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THE 
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THE 
WOOINGS OF JEZEBEL PETTYFER 


Haldane Mac Fall 


THE LIFE OF HENRI BRULARD 
Henry Beyle-Stendhal 


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Richard Garnett 


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Jules Barbey d’ Aurevilly 
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Translated from the French, with an 
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AND AN ESSAY BY 
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ALFRED A. KNOPF 
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COPYRIGHT, 1925, BY ALFRED A. KNOPF, INC. * 
PUBLISHED, MARCH, 1925 ° 


PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 


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CONTENTS 
Weed 
INTRODUCTION by Ernest Boyd 
JULES BARBEY D’AUREVILLY by Sir Edmund Gosse 
THE CRIMSON CURTAIN 
THE GREATEST LOVE OF DON JUAN 
HAPPINESS IN CRIME 


BENEATH THE CARDS OF A GAME OF WHIST 


— AT A DINNER OF ATHEISTS 


| A WOMAN’S REVENGE 


Vii 


Xill 


51 


77 


127 


181 


239 


Digitized by the Internet Archive 
in 2021 with funding from 
University of Illinois Uroana-Champaign 


https ://archive.org/details/diaboliquesOObarb 





INTRODUCTION 
BY ERNEST BOYD 


Juzes AmepEe Barsey p’AuREVILLY was born at Saint-Sauveur- 
le-vicomte, in that Norman peninsula of La Manche whose claim 
upon the attention of the modern world lies rather in the fact that 
it serves as a background for the peculiar beauties of Cherbourg. 
That sonorous string of vocables appears in somewhat truncated 
form in the parish register, which says: “On Wednesday, this 
second day of November, 1808, Julle-Amédez Barbey, born 
yesterday, the legitimate offspring of Monsieur André-Marie- 
Théophile Barbey and Dame Ernestine-Eulalie-Théose Ango, his 
wife, was baptised by M. Dubost,” who did not, as the record 
shows, foresee that this infant would find Barbey inadequate until, 
in his twenty-fifth year, he added the d’Aurevilly title which 
one of his uncles had borne, although by this time the lands of 
Aureville had passed out of the possession of the family. How- 
ever, when Barbey d’Aurevilly died in Paris, at the age of eighty- 
one, that genealogical inexactitude was the least of the legends 
connected with this almost mythological figure. 

During his long life, which actually embraced in its span the 
First Empire, the Restoration of the Bourbons, Louis Philippe, 
the Second Republic, the Second Empire, and the Third Republic, 
Barbey d’Aurevilly produced a very considerable amount of 
literature; forty-one volumes of poetry, fiction, criticism and 
biography which, with posthumous publications amounting to 
nearly half as many again, brings the complete bibliography of 
his writings to the total of sixty-three volumes. His verse is of 
little importance, but as a critic he presents a phenomenon of 


some interest. He was the rival and adversary of Sainte-Beuve, 
vii 


viil INTRODUCTION 


and during the same years both men necessarily commented 
upon the same publications as they appeared. As the one was 
the antithesis of the other, the divergence of their views makes 
comparison between them rather amusing for those interested 
in literary history. Barbey d’Aurevilly is impetuous, extrava- 
gant, impressionistic and inconsistent. His opponent was subtle, 
malicious, learned and authoritative. D’Aurevilly called Victor 
Hugo “an imbecile of genius”; the salon of Louise Colet was an 
“academic oyster bed”; Corneille was a “hydrocephalic hunch- 
back,” and the activities of George Sand were compared to those 
of a mother stork bringing innumerable little adulteries into the 
home. He had no sense of logic, consistency or proportion, and 
reviled the same authors for the same works which he had al- 
ready praised. His own stories were anathema to all moralists, 
and blasphemous in the eyes of good, Catholics, but he never 
ceased to declare himself a militant and pious child of the 
Church, and was loud in his denunciations of the immorality of 
all writers whom he did not like, from the author of Manon 
Lescaut to Elle et lui. Yet, to his credit stands his immediate 
appreciation of Baudelaire, Becque, Huysmans, Mendès, Bourget 
and Richepin, when he was often alone in his recognition of their 
potentialities. 

The qualities which still lend a flavor to his criticism, however 
wrong-headed,—his mastery of striking epithet, his superb 
courage and imagination—find their supreme expression in his 
fiction. After writing, at the age of sixteen, an Ode to the Heroes 
of Thermopylae, inspired by the Greek war of independence, and 
dedicated to Casimir Delavigne, he began his literary career 
proper, in 1834, with his first book of fiction, Amaïdée, which 
was not published until after his death, in 1890. To the same 
period belongs the story Germaine, written in 1835, but published 
forty-nine years later under the title of Ce qui ne meurt pas, which 
is known to English-speaking readers in the translation, “What 
Never Dies,” attributed to Oscar Wilde. After two books of 
minor merit, there began to appear those works upon which he 


ERNEST BOYD 1X 
established the fame that slowly accumulated during his life- 
time: Une vieille maitresse, L’Ensorcelée, Le Chevalier des 
Touches, Un prétre marié, Les diaboliques, and Une histoire sans 
nom, which happens to have been his first book to appear in 
English, when Edgar Saltus published 4 Story without a Name, 
in 1891. 

The trait common to all these stories, and the characteristic 
mark of Barbey d’Aurevilly’s peculiar talent, is their Satanic 
mysticism, their preoccupation with what is diabolical, in the 
literal and original sense of that word. The title, Les diaboliques, 
describes not only the six women of this book, but the central 
figures in all the others, for all Barbey’s characters are pos- 
sessed by the devil. In L’ensorcelée, the Abbé Croix-Jugan, his 
face seared by the pistol shot with which he tried to commit 
suicide, looked “like a demon in priestly garb, who came to defy 
God in His own Church, in the shadow of the crucifix.” He was 
shot at the altar by a jealous husband, and his spectre haunts 
the church of Blanchelande at midnight, when the clock always 
strikes nine (the hour at which the mass was interrupted), try- 
ing to celebrate a phantom mass to the end. It is significant that 
this same volume contained Le dessous de cartes d’une partie de 
whist, which was included in Les diaboliques, twenty years later, 
and which made “the dowagers cry out against the corruption of 
their daughters” and the author’s “devilish writings.” La vieille 
maitresse, which is the other novel belonging to the period when 
Barbey’s Catholicism was most intransigeant, is as Satanic as 
any of the works which followed his break with the pious friend 
of his youth and his publisher, Trébutien, who acted as a check 
upon Barbey’s instinctive Romantic æstheticism. That element 
warred incessantly with his Christian moralism, but neither 
Trébutien nor any other orthodox believer could reconcile 
d’Aurevilly’s stern theories with his immoral practice. La Vellini 
was “a feminine trilogy, composed of woman, demon and animal,” 
and even this most Balzacian of his novels was never accepted, 
as Barbey wished La Vieille maitresse to be accepted, as a work 


x INTRODUCTION 


of lofty Catholic morality. So much the worse, said he, for the 
“bloodless of good taste,” which became his favourite expression 
of contempt. 

The Chevalier des Touches, as a layman, is lacking in that 
flavour of sacrilege and blasphemy in which Barbey d’Aurevilly’s 
Catholic soul found its shuddering delight, but he is an enigmatic, 
cruel, androgynous figure, of the authentic diabolonian lineage. 
The Abbé Sombreval in Un prétre marié is the perfect devil’s 
disciple, this priest who has broken his vows, and whose daughter 
has the mark of the cross upon her forehead, who loves her to 
a point at which no crime nor blasphemy can stop him, but who 
loses her to God and ends by disinterring her corpse and disap- 
pearing for ever from mortal sight by jumping into a pond with 
the girl clasped in his arms. No trace of them is ever found. 
His reverend brother in evil is the Capuchin father Riculf in 
Une histoire sans nom, whose mission to the little village in the 
Cevennes includes the rape of Lasthénie de Ferjol while she is 
lying in a somnambulistic sleep on the staircase, with mysterious 
consequences which are explained only after the broken-hearted 
girl is dead. Léon Bloy, in many ways the unique successor to 
Barbey’s disquieting tradition of Catholicism in French literature, 
declared that Un prétre marié was “the only Christian novel 
which a human being could read,” but the Archbishop of Paris 
ordered every copy of it to be destroyed. Like Jules Lemaitre, 
that prelate apparently thought that there was “nothing less 
Christian than the Catholicism of M. d’Aurevilly. It looks like 
the feather in a musketeer’s cap. . . . M. d’Aurevilly wears his 
God in his hat.” The damned have an irresistible attraction for 
him. “He cannot admit that they could ever be flat-footed or 
poor devils . . . Almost all the heroes of the novels written by 
this Christian are atheists, and atheists of genius—with tender 
hearts. He regards them with a terror full of secret tenderness. 
He is deliciously fascinated by the devil.” 

Jules Lemaitre, it is clear, was not very sympathetic to Barbey, 
and saw the ludicrous rather than the weirdly imaginative side 


ERNEST BOYD xi 
of him. Sadistic Catholicism had no attraction for the French 
critic, either in his sceptical youth, when he wrote his Contem- 
porains, or in the later period of his patriotic and right-thinking 
royalism, although never was there a more vociferous monarchist, 
aristocrat and champion of law and order than Barbey d’Aurevilly. 
Yet, one will search in vain for his name even in a footnote to 
any of the standard histories of French literature by Brunetière, 
Faguet, Doumic, and Lanson—not to mention their imitators 
and echoes in America and England. George Saintsbury and 
Edmund Gosse have rushed in where the Professors Nitze and 
Dargan and the rest fear to tread. But appreciation of Barbey 
d’Aurevilly has been restricted to the “happy few” of Stendhal, 
who was with Byron and Balzac the master of the author of 
Les diaboliques. These three are a strange but happy combina- 
tion, the more so perhaps because Barbey, with characteristic 
perversity, realized without disapprobation the incest motive in 
Byron’s life, and actually related a complaisant story of the same 
kind, founded upon historical fact, in Une page d'histoire, his 
last work of narrative prose, but denounced Edgar Allan Poe, 
whose power he recognized, as a reprehensible influence! 

His style has been described as “brutal and exquisite, violent 
and delicate, bitter and sweet. It is like a witches’ brew com- 
posed of flowers and serpents, tigers’ blood and honey,”—a com- 
pliment decidedly in his own style. Readers of The Pleasant 
Memoirs of the Marquis of Bradomin will find in Les diaboliques 
the source of Ramon del Valle-Inclan’s inspiration, for Barbey 
d’Aurevilly, like the Marquis, was “ugly, Catholic and senti- 
mental.” The story of The Crimson Curtain is in essence the 
fourth Sonata of the Memoirs, and the Spanish novelist’s first. 
book was palpably patterned on Les diaboliques. Femeninas 
was also a series of six studies of women, with La Nifia Chole so 
typical a figure out of Barbey d’Aurevilly that the stories were 
later republished as Historias perversas, and served in part to 
make the Sonata of Summer in the Memoirs, which is, in turn, 
essentially a work after Barbey’s own heart, in its mixture of 


Xil INTRODUCTION 
perversity, romanticism, blasphemy and sentimentality. Ramon 
del Valle-Inclan learned also from his French predecessor the 
value of creating a personal legend and dressing one’s part in 
literature. Barbey d’Aurevilly, as became a dandy of 1840, who 
had written a book on Beau Brummel and dandyisme, preserved 
to the end of his life the corset and the costume of the period. 
Eye-witnesses report that he looked like Mesnilgrand, the hero 
of Un diner d’athées. 

He wore what he himself would call “a love of a frock coat,” 
with flowing skirts and broad lapels. His waistcoat was of velvet 
or black cashmere, and his white cravat had the tint of old ivory, 
dotted with imperceptible little hand-embroidered stars. He 
wore lace cuffs fastened with diamond studs, and plum-coloured 
trousers with mauve tints, strapped under his boots. His long 
hair, beneath a huge wideawake hat, was dyed, and, as his nails 
were long, they were usually black, because he would run his 
fingers wildly through his mane. Such was the figure whom 
Anatole France remembered when, as a child of nine, he went 
out with his grandmother, who pointed out the gentleman with 
the hat whose brim was of crimson velvet, and who slapped his 
tight, gold braided trousers with his riding-whip. It was the 
same figure upon whom France and Paul Bourget used to call 
later on, when he lived in his bare little room in the Rue Rousselet, 
concealing his poverty with his accustomed magnificence: “T 
have sent my furniture and my tapestries to my estate in the 
country.” He was one of Anatole France’s earliest memories 
and one of the most enduring, and so he will be for those who 
once submit to his violent enchantment. Who could forget the 
man who said to Baudelaire: “I have always put my passions 
above my convictions”? It would be difficult to find a better 
summary of Barbey d’Aurevilly, the man and his work. 


ature 


JULES BARBEY D’AUREVILLY * 
BY SIR EDMUND GOSSE 


Txose who can endure an excursion into the backwaters of lit- 
erature may contemplate, neither too seriously nor too lengthily, 
the career and writings of Barbey d’Aurevilly. Very obscure in 
his youth, he lived so long, and preserved his force so consistently, 
that in his old age he became, if not quite a celebrity, most cer- 
tainly a notoriety. At the close of his life—he reached his eighty- 
first year—he was still to be seen walking the streets or haunting 
the churches of Paris, his long, sparse hair flying in the wind, his 
fierce eyes flashing about him, his hat poised on the side of his 
head, his famous lace frills turned back over the cuff of his coat, 
his attitude always erect, defiant, and formidable. Down to the 
winter of 1888 he preserved the dandy dress of 1840, and never 
appeared but as M. de Pontmartin has described him, in black 
satih trousers, which fitted his old legs like a glove, in a flapping, 
brigand wide-awake, in a velvet waistcoat, which revealed diamond 
studs and a lace cravat, and in a wonderful shirt that covered 
the most artful pair of stays. In every action, in every glance, 
he seemed to be defying the natural decay of years, and to be 
forcing old age to forget him by dint of spirited and ceaseless self- 
assertion. He was himself the prototype of all the Brassards 
and Misnilgrands of his stories, the dandy of dandies, the mum- 
mied and immortal beau. 

His intellectual condition was not unlike his physical one. He 
was a survival—of the most persistent. ‘The last, by far the last, 
of the Romantiques of 1835, Barbey d’Aurevilly lived on into an 


* Reprinted by permission of the publishers, Messrs. Charles Scribners’ 


Sons, from French Profiles, 
xiii 


XIV JULES BARBEY D’AUREVILLY 
age wholly given over to other aims and ambitions, without 
changing his own ideals by an iota. He was to the great man 
who began the revival, to figures like Alfred de Vigny, as Shirley 
was to the early Elizabethans. He continued the old tradition, 
without resigning a single habit or prejudice, until his mind was 
not a whit less old-fashioned than his garments. Victor Hugo, 
who hated him, is said to have dedicated an unpublished verse 
to his portrait: 


“Barbey d’Aurevilly, formidable imbécile.” 


But imbécile was not at all the right word. He was absurd; he 
was outrageous; he had, perhaps, by dint of resisting the de- 
crepitude of his natural powers, become a little crazy. But im- 
becility is the very last word to use of this mutinous, dogged, 
implacable old pirate of letters. 

Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly was born near Valognes (the “V i 
which figures in several of his stories) on the 2nd of November, 
1808. He liked to represent himself as a scion of the bluest no- 
bility of Normandy, and he communicated to the makers of dic- 
tionaries the fact that the name of his direct ancestor is engraved 
on the tomb of William the Conqueror. But some have said that 
the names of his father and mother were never known, and 
others (poor d’Aurevilly!) have set him down as the son of a 
butcher in the village of Saint-Sauveur-le-Vicomte. While yet a 
school-boy, in 1825, he published an elegy Aux héros des 
Thermopyles, and dedicated it to Casimir Delavigne. He was 
at college with Maurice de Guérin, and quite early he became 
personally acquainted with Chateaubriand. His youth seems to 
be wrapped up in mystery; according to one of the best-informed 
of his biographers, he vanished in 1831, and was not heard of 
again until 1851. ‘To these twenty years of alleged disappearance, 
one or two remarkable books of his are, however, ascribed. So 
characteristic a novel as L'Amour Impossible saw the light in 
1841, and it appears that what is perhaps the most character- 
istic of all his writings, Du Dandyisme et de Georges Brummell, 





SIR EDMUND GOSSE XV 
was written as early as 1842. In 1845 a very small edition of 
it was printed by an admirer of the name of Trebutien, to whose 
affection d’Aurevilly seems to have owed his very existence. It 
is strange that so little is distinctly known about a man who, late 
in life, attracted much curiosity and attention. He was a con- 
summate romancer, and he liked to hint that he was engaged 
during early life in intrigues of a corsair description. The truth 
seems to be that he lived, in great obscurity, in the neighbour- 
hood of Caen, probably by the aid of journalism. 

Of all the productions of his youth, the only one which can 
now be met with is the prose poem of Amaidée, written, I sup- 
pose, about 1835; this was published by M. Paul Bourget as a 
curiosity immediately after Barbey d’Aurevilly’s death. Judged 
as a story, Amaidée is puerile; it describes how to a certain poet, 
called Somegod, who dwelt on a lonely cliff, there came a young 
man altogether wise and stately named Altai, and a frail daughter 
of passion, who gives her name to the book. These three per- 
sonages converse in magnificent language, and, the visitors pres- 
ently departing, the volume closes. But an interest attaches to 
the fact that in Somegod (Quelque Dieu!) the author was paint- 
ing a portrait of Maurice de Guérin, while the majestic Altai is 
himself. The conception of this book is Ossianic; but the style 
is often singularly beautiful, with a marmoreal splendour founded 
on a study of Chateaubriand and, perhaps, of Goethe, and not 
without relation to that of Guérin himself. 

The earliest surviving production of d’Aurevilly, if we except 
Amaidée, is L’Amour Impossible, a novel published with the 
object of correcting the effects of the poisonous Lélia of George 
Sand. Already, in the crude book, we see something of the 
Barbey d’Aurevilly of the future, the Dandy-Paladin, the Catholic 
Sensualist or Diavolist, the author of the few poor thoughts and 
the sonorous, paroxysmal, abundant style. I forget whether it is 
here or in a slightly later novel that, in hastily turning the pages, 
I detect the sentiment, “Our forefathers were wise to cut the 
throats of the Huguenots, and very stupid not to burn Luther.” 


XVI JULES BARBEY D’AUREVILLY 


The late Master of Balliol is said to have asked a reactionary 
undergraduate: “What, sir! would you burn, would you burn!” 
If he had put the question to Barbey d’Aurevilly, the scented 
hand would have been laid on the cambric bosom, and the answer 
would have been: “Certainly I should.” In the midst of the 
infidel society and literature of the Second Empire, d’Aurevilly 
persisted in the most noisy profession of his entire loyalty to 
Rome, but his methods of proclaiming his attachment were so 
violent and outrageous that the Church showed no gratitude to 
her volunteer defender. This was a source of much bitterness and 
recrimination, but it is difficult to see how the author of Le Prétre 
Marié (1864) and Une Histoire sans Nom (1882) could expect 
pious Catholics to smile on his very peculiar treatment of eccle- 
siastical life. 

Barbey d’Aurevilly undertook to continue the work of Chateau- 
briand, and he gave his full attention to a development of the 
monarchical neo-catholicism which that great inaugurator had 
sketched out. He was impressed by the beauty of the Roman 
ceremonial, and he determined to express with poetic emotion the 
mystical majesty of the symbol. It must be admitted that, al- 
though his work never suggests any knowledge of or sympathy 
with the spiritual part of religion, he has a genuine appreciation of 
its externals. It would be difficult to point to a more delicate and 
full impression of the solemnity which attends the crepuscular light 
of a church at vespers than is given in the opening pages of À un 
Diner d’Athées. In L’Ensorcelée (1854), too, we find the author 
piously following a chanting procession round a church, and ejacu- 
lating: “Rien n’est beau comme cet instant solennel des céré- 
momes catholiques” Almost every one of his novels deals by 
preference with ecclesiastical subjects, or introduces some power- 
ful figure of a priest. But it is very difficult to believe that his 
interest in it all is other than histrionic or phenomenal. He likes 
the business of a priest, he likes the furniture of a church, but 
there, in spite of his vehement protestations, his piety seems to 
a candid reader to have begun and ended. 


SIR EDMUND GOSSE XVII 

For a humble and reverent child of the Catholic Church, it 
must be confessed that Barbey d’Aurevilly takes strange liberties. 
The mother would seem to have had little control over the caprices 
of her extremely unruly son. There is scarcely one of these ultra- 
Catholic novels of his which it is conceivable that a pious family 
would like to see lying upon its parlour table. The Devil takes 
a prominent part in many of them, for d’Aurevilly’s whim is to 
see Satanism everywhere, and to consider it matter of mirth; he 
is like a naughty boy, giggling when a rude man breaks his 
mother’s crockery. He loves to play with dangerous and for- 
bidden notions. In Le Prétre Marié (which, to his lofty indigna- 
tion, was forbidden to be sold in Catholic shops) the hero is a 
renegade and incestuous priest, who loves his own daughter, and 
makes a hypocritical confession of error in order that, by that 
act of perjury, he may save her life, as she is dying of the agony 
of knowing him to be an atheist. ‘This man, the Abbé Sombreval, 
is bewitched, is possessed of the Devil, and so is Ryno de Marigny 
in Une Vieille Maîtresse, and Lasthénie de Ferjol in Une Histoire 
sans Nom. This is one of Barbey d’Aurevilly’s favourite tricks, 
to paint an extraordinary, an abnormal condition of spirit, and to 
avoid the psychological difficulty by simply attributing it to sor- 
cery. But he is all the time rather amused by the wickedness 
than shocked at it. In Le Bonheur dans le Crime—the moral of 
which is that people of a certain grandeur of temperament can be 
absolutely wicked with impunity—he frankly confesses his parti- 
ality for “la plaisanterie légèrement sacrilége,’ and all the philoso- 
phy of d’Aurevilly is revealed in that rash phrase. It is not a 
matter of a wounded conscience expressing itself with a brutal 
fervour, but the gusto of conscious wickedness. His mind is in- 
timately akin with that of the Neapolitan lady, whose story he 
was perhaps the first to tell, who wished that it only were a sin 
to drink iced sherbet. Barbey d’Aurevilly 1s a devil who 
may or may not believe, but who always makes a point of trem- 
bling. 

The most interesting feature of Barbey d’Aurevilly’s tempera- 


XVIII JULES BARBEY D’AUREVILLY 


ment, as revealed in his imaginative work, is, however, his pre- 
occupation with his own physical life. In his youth, Byron and 
Alfieri were the objects of his deepest idolatry; he envied their 
disdainful splendour of passion; and he fashioned his dream in 
poverty and obscurity so as to make himself believe that he was 
of their race. He was a Disraeli—with whom, indeed, he has cer- 
tain relations of style—but with none of Disraeli’s social advan- 
tages, and with a more inconsequent and violent habit of im- 
agination. Unable, from want of wealth and position, to carry 
his dreams into effect, they became exasperated and intensified, 
and at an age when the real dandy is settling down into a man 
of the world, Barbey d’Aurevilly was spreading the wings of his 
fancy into the infinite azure of imaginary experience. He had 
convinced himself that he was a Lovelace, a Lauzun, a Brummell, 
and the philosophy of dandyism filled his thoughts far more than 
if he had really been able to spend a stormy youth among mar- 
chionesses who carried, set in diamonds in a bracelet, the ends of 
the moustaches of viscounts. In the novels of his maturity and 
his old age, therefore, Barbey d’Aurevilly loved to introduce mag- 
nificent aged dandies, whose fatuity he dwelt upon with ecstasy, 
and in whom there is no question that he saw reflections of his 
imaginary self. No better type of this can be found than that 
Vicomte de Brassard, an elaborate, almost enamoured, portrait 
of whom fills the earlier pages of what is else a rather dull story, 
Le Rideau Cramoisi. The very clever, very immoral tale called 
Le Plus Bel Amour de Don Juan—which relates how a super- 
annuated but still incredibly vigorous old beau gives a supper to 
the beautiful women of quality whom he has known, and recounts 
to them the most piquant adventure of his life—is redolent of 
this intense delight in the prolongation of enjoyment by sheer 
refusal to admit the ravages of age. Although my space forbids 
quotation, I cannot resist repeating a passage which illustrates 
this horrible fear of the loss of youth and the struggle against it, 
more especially as it is a good example of d’Aurevilly’s surcharged 
and intrepid style: 


SIR EDMUND GOSSE XIX 


“Il n'y avait pas là de ces jeunesses vert tendre, de ces petites demoiselles 
quexécrait Byron, qui sentent la tartelette et qui, par la tournure, ne sont 
encore que des épluchettes, mais tous étés splendides et savoureux, plantureux 
automnes, épanouissements et plénitudes, seins éblouissants battant leur plein 
majestueux au bord découvert des corsages, et, sous les camées de l’épaule 
nue, des bras de tout galbe, mais surtout des bras puissants, de ces biceps 
de Sabines qui ont lutté avec les Romains, et qui seraient capables de 
s’entrelacer, pour l'arrêter, dans les rayons de la roue du char de la vie.” 


This obsession of vanishing youth, this intense determination 
to preserve the semblance and colour of vitality, in spite of the 
passage of years, is however, seen to greatest advantage in a very 
curious book of Barbey d’Aurevilly’s, in some aspects, indeed, 
the most curious which he has left behind him, Du Dandyisme et 
de Georges Brummell. This is really a work of his early maturity, 
for, as I have said, it was printed so long ago as 1845. It was 
not published, however, until 1861, when it may be said to have 
introduced its author to the world of France. Later on he wrote 
a curious study of the fascination exercised over La Grande 
Mademoiselle by Lauzun, Un Dandy d’avant les Dandys, and 
these two are now published in one volume, which forms that 
section of the immense work of d’Aurevilly which best rewards 
the curious reader. 

Many writers in England, from Thomas Carlyle in Sartor Re- 
sartus to our ingenious young forger of paradoxes, Mr. Max 
Beerbohm, have dealt upon that semi-feminine passion in fatuity, 
that sublime attention to costume and deportment, which marks 
the dandy. The type has been, as d’Aurevilly does not fail to 
observe, mainly an English one. We point to Beau Nash, to 
Byron, to Lord Yarmouth, to Sheridan, and, above all, “à ce 
Dandy royal, S. M. Georges IV”; but the star of each of these 
must pale before that of Brummell. These others, as was said in 
a different matter, had “other preoccupations,” but Brummell was 
entirely absorbed, as by a solemn mission, by the conduct of his 
person and his clothes. So far, in the portraiture of such a figure, 
there is nothing very singular in what the French novelist has 


XX | JULES BARBEY D’AUREVILLY 


skilfully and nimbly done, but it is his own attitude which is so 
original. All other writers on the dandies have had their tongues 
in their cheeks. If they have commended, it is because to be pre- 
posterous is to be amusing. When we read that “dandyism is 
the least selfish of all the arts,” we smile, for we know that the 
author’s design is to be entertaining. But Barbey d’Aurevilly 
is doggedly in earnest. He loves the great dandies of the past 
as other men contemplate with ardour dead poets and dead musi- 
cians. He is seriously enamoured of their mode of life. He sees 
nothing ridiculous, nothing even limited, in their self-concentration. 
It reminds him of the tiger and of the condor; it recalls to his 
imagination the vast, solitary forces of Nature; and when he con- 
templates Beau Brummell, his eyes fill with tears of nostalgia. 
So would he have desired to live; thus, and not otherwise, would 
he fain have strutted and trampled through that eighteenth cen- 
tury to which he is for ever gazing back with a fond regret. “To 
dress one’s self,” he says, “should be the main business of life,” 
and with great ingenuity he dwells upon the latent but positive 
influence which dress has had on men of a nature apparently 
furthest removed from its trivialities; upon Pascal, for instance, 
upon Buffon, upon Wagner. 

It was natural that a writer who delighted in this patrician 
ideal of conquering man should have a limited conception of life. 
Women to Barbey d’Aurevilly were of two varieties—either nuns 
or amorous tigresses; they were sometimes both in one. He had 
no idea of soft gradations in society: there were the tempestuous 
marchioness and her intriguing maid on one side; on the other, 
emptiness, the sordid hovels of the bourgeoisie. This absence 
of observation or recognition of life d’Aurevilly shared with the 
other Romantiques, but in his sinister and contemptuous aristoc- 
racy he passed beyond them all. Had he lived to become ac- 
quainted with the writings of Nietzsche, he would have hailed a 
brother-spirit, one who loathed democracy and the humanitarian 
temper as much as he did himself. But there is no philosophy in 


SIR EDMUND GOSSE XXI 
Barbey d’Aurevilly, nothing but a prejudice fostered and a senti- 
ment indulged. 

In referring to Nicholas Nickleby, a novel which he vainly en- 
deavoured to get through, d’Aurevilly remarks: “I wish to write 
an essay on Dickens, and at present I have read only one hundred 
pages of his writings. But I consider that if one hundred pages 
do not give the talent of a man, they give his spirit, and the spirit 
of Dickens is odious to me.” “The vulgar Dickens,” he calmly 
remarks in Journalistes et Polémistes, and we laugh at the idea 
of sweeping away such a record of genius on the strength of a 
chapter or two misread in Nicholas Nickleby. But Barbey 
d’Aurevilly was not Dickens, and it really is not necessary to 
study closely the vast body of his writings. The same charac- 
teristics recur in them all, and the impression may easily be 
weakened by vain repetition. In particular, a great part of the 
later life of d’Aurevilly was occupied in writing critical notices 
and studies for newspapers and reviews. He made this, I sup- 
pose, his principal source of income; and from the moment when, 
in 1851, he became literary critic to Le Pays to that of his death, 
nearly forty years later, he was incessantly dogmatizing about 
literature and art. He never became a critical force, he was too 
violent and, indeed, too empty for that; but a pen so brilliant as 
his is always welcome with editors whose design is not to be true, 
but to be noticeable, and to escape “the obvious.” ‘The most cruel 
of Barbey d’Aurevilly’s enemies could not charge his criticism 
with being obvious. It is intensely contentious and contradictory. 
It treats all writers and artists on the accepted nursery principle 
of “Go and see what baby’s doing, and tell him not to.” ‘This 
is entertaining for a moment; and if the shower of abuse is spread 
broadly enough, some of it must come down on shoulders that 
deserve it. But the “slashing” review of yester-year is dismal 
reading, and it cannot be said that the library of reprinted criti- 
cism to which d’Aurevilly gave the general title of Les Œuvres 
et les Hommes (1861-65) is very enticing. 


XXII JULES BARBEY D’AUREVILLY 


He had a great contempt for Goethe and for Sainte-Beuve, in 
whom he saw false priests constantly leading the public away from 
the true principle of literary expression, “le couronnement, la 
gloire et la force de toute critique, que je cherche en vain.” A 
very ingenious writer, M. Ernest Tissot, has paid Barbey d’Aure- 
villy the compliment of taking him seriously in this matter, and 
has written an elaborate study on what his criterium was. But 
this is, perhaps, to inquire too kindly. I doubt whether he sought 
with any very sincere expectation of finding; like the Persian sage, 
“he swore, but was he sober when he swore?” Was he not rather 
intoxicated with his self-encouraged romantic exasperation, and 
determined to be fierce, independent, and uncompromising at all 
hazards? Such are, at all events, the doubts awakened by his 
indignant diatribes, which once amused Paris so much, and now 
influence no living creature. Some of his dicta, in their showy 
way, are forcible. “La critique a pour blason la croix, la balance 
et la glaive”; that is a capital phrase on the lips of a reviewer, 
who makes himself the appointed Catholic censor of worldly let- 
ters, and is willing to assume at once the cross, the scales, and 
the sword. More of the hoof peeps out in this: “La critique, 
c'est une intrépidité de l'esprit et du caractére.’ To a nature 
like that of d’Aurevilly, the distinction between intrepidity and 
arrogance is never clearly defined. 

It is, after all, in his novels that Barbey d’Aurevilly displays his 
talent in its most interesting form. His powers developed late; 
and perhaps the best-constructed of all his tales is Une Histoire 
sans Nom, which dates from 1882, when he was quite an old 
man. In this, as in all the rest, a surprising narrative is well, 
although extremely leisurely, told, but without a trace of psychol- 
ogy. It was impossible for d’Aurevilly to close his stories ef- 
fectively; in almost every case, the futility and extravagance of 
the last few pages destroys the effect of the rest. Like the Fat 
Boy, he wanted to make your flesh creep, to leave you cataleptic 
with horror at the end, but he had none of Poe’s skill in producing 
an effect of terror. In Le Rideau Cramoisi (which is considered, 


SIR EDMUND GOSSE XXlil 


I cannot tell why, one of his successes), the heroine dies at an 
embarrassing moment, without any disease or cause of death 
being suggested—she simply dies. But he is generally much more 
violent than this; at the close of 4 un Diner d’Athées, which up 
to a certain point is an extremely fine piece of writing, the angry 
parents pelt one another with the mummied heart of their only 
child; in Le Dessous des Cartes, the key of all the intrigue is dis- 
covered at last in the skeleton of an infant buried in a box of mi- 
gnonette. If it is not by a monstrous fact, it is by an audacious 
feat of anti-morality, that Barbey d’Aurevilly seeks to harrow and 
terrify our imaginations. In Le Bonheur dans le Crime, Haute- 
claire Stassin, the woman-fencer, and the Count of Savigny pursue 
their wild intrigue and murder the Countess slowly, and then 
marry each other, and live, with youth far prolonged (d’Aure- 
villy’s special idea of divine blessing), without a pang of remorse, 
without a crumpled rose-leaf in their felicity, like two magnifi- 
cent plants spreading in the violent moisture of a tropical forest. 
On the whole, it is as a writer, pure and simple, that Barbey 
d’Aurevilly claims most attention. His style, which Paul de Saint- 
Victor (quite in his own spirit) described as a mixture of tiger’s 
blood and honey, is full of extravagant beauty. He has a strange 
intensity, a sensual and fantastic force, in his torrent of inter- 
twined sentences and preposterous exclamations. The volume 
called Les Diaboliques, which contains a group of his most charac- 
teristic stories, published in 1874, may be recommended to those 
who wish, in a single example, compendiously to test the quality of 
Barbey d’Aurevilly. He has a curious love of punning, not for 
purposes of humour, but to intensify his style: “Quel oubli 
et quelle oubliette” (Le Dessous des Cartes), “boudoir fleur de 
pêcher ou de péché” (Le Plus bel Amour), “renoncer à Pamour 
malpropre, mais jamais à l'amour propre” (A un Diner d Athées). 
He has audacious phrases which linger in the memory: “Le 
Profil, c’est Pécueil de la beauté” (Le Bonheur dans le Crime); 
“Les verres a champagne de France, un lotus qui faisait [les 
Anglais] oublier les sombres et religieuses habitudes de la patrie”; 


XXIV JULES BARBEY D’AUREVILLY 


“Elle avait air de monter vers Dieu, las mains toutes pleines de 
bonnes œuvres” (Memoranda). 

That Barbey d’Aurevilly will take any prominent place in the 
history of literature is improbable. He was a curiosity, a droll, 
obstinate survival. We like to think of him in his incredible 
dress, strolling through the streets of Paris, with his clouded cane 
like a sceptre in one hand, and in the other that small mirror by 
which every few minutes he adjusted the poise of his cravat, or 
the studious tempest of his hair. He was a wonderful old fop 
or beau of the forties handed down to the eighties in perfect 
preservation. As a writer he was fervid, sumptuous, magnifi- 
cently puerile; I have been told that he was a superb talker, that 
his conversation was like his books, a flood of paradoxical, flam- 
boyant rhetoric. He made a gallant stand against old age, he 
defied it long with success, and when it conquered him at last, 
he retired to his hole like a rat, and died with stoic fortitude, alone, 
without a friend to close his eyelids. It was in a wretched lodg- 
ing high up in a house in the Rue Rousselet, all his finery cast 
aside, and three melancholy cats the sole mourners by his body, 
that they found, on an April morning of 1889, the ruins of what 
had once been Barbey d’Aurevilly. 


THE CRIMSON CURTAIN 










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THE CRIMSON CURTAIN 


A CONSIDERABLE number of years ago I went to shoot waterfowl 
in the western marshes, and, as there was no railway then, I 
took the diligence, which passed the cross-roads near the Chateau 
de Rueil, and which at that precise moment contained only one 
passenger inside. This person, a very remarkable man in every 
respect, and whom I knew by having often met him in society, 
I will ask your permission to introduce as the Vicomte de Bras- 
sard. The precaution is probably useless! The few hundred 
people who constitute Parisian society are, no doubt, able to 
supply the real name. It was about five o’clock in the evening. 
The sun shed its slanting rays on a dusty road, edged with 
poplar-trees and fields, through which we rattled, drawn by four 
stout horses, whose strong flanks rolled heavily at each crack 
of the postilion’s whip—a postilion always reminds me of life, 
there is a great deal too much whip-cracking at the outset. 
Vicomte de Brassard was at that time of life when he was no 
longer disposed to crack his whip. But he was one of those 
men worthy of being an Englishman (he was educated in Eng- 
land), who, if he had been mortally wounded, would have died 
declaring he was alive. In the world, and even in books, we are 
used to laugh“at the pretensions to youth of those who have 
passed the happy age of inexperience and foolishness—and the 
custom is not a bad one when the pretensions take a ridiculous 
form; but when they do not, but on the contrary assume a pride 
that will not confess defeat, I do not say they are not senseless, 
for they are useless, but they deserve respect, like many other 
senseless things. If it was heroic of the Guards at Waterloo to 
die and not surrender, it is the same when we are face to face 


with old age, which is not so romantic as bayonets. Some heads 
3 


4 THE DIABOLIQUES 


are built in a military manner, never to surrender, and that is 
the whole question, as it was at Waterloo. 

Vicomte de Brassard, who has not surrendered—he is still 
alive, and I will tell you about him later, for it is worth knowing 
—Vicomte de Brassard was then, at the time when I travelled 
with him in the diligence, what the world, which is as spiteful as 
an old woman, rudely calls “an old beau.” For those who care 
little for words or figures, and who deem that in the matter of 
age a man is only as old as he appears to be, Vicomte de Bras- 
sard might have passed for a “beau” without any qualification. 
At least, at that very time the Marquise de V . . . —who was an 
expert judge of young men, and who had shaved a dozen men 
as clean as Delilah shaved Samson—wore, with much pride in 
an enamelled gold bracelet, one of the ends of the Vicomte’s 
moustache, of which time, or the devil, had not changed the 
colour. Only, whether old or not, do not attach to the expression 
“beau,” as the world has done, an idea of someone frivolous, lean, 
and cadaverous, for you would not have a proper idea of Vicomte 
de Brassard, in whom everything—intellect, manners, physiog- 
nomy—was large, opulent, redolent of patrician calmness, as 
befitted the most magnificent dandy I have ever known—I, who 
have seen Brummell go mad, and d’Orsay die. 

For he was really a true dandy. If he had been less so, he 
would certainly have become Marshal of France. He had been 
in his youth one of the most brilliant officers of the latter days 
of the First Empire. I have heard it said many times by his 
regimental comrades that he was distinguished by the bravery 
of Murat added to that of Marmont, and that as he was cool 
and level-headed when the drums were not beating, he might in 
a short time have attained to the highest rank of the military 
hierarchy if it had not been for dandyism. If you combine 
dandyism with the qualities which go to make up an officer— 
discipline, regularity, etc.—you will see how much of the officer 
will remain in the combination, and whether he does not blow 
up like a powder-magazine. If the Vicomte de Brassard had 


THE CRIMSON CURTAIN 5 


never exploded, it was because, like all dandies, he was happy. 
Mazarin would have employed him—and so would Mazarin’s 
nieces, but for another reason. He was superb. 

He had had that beauty which is necessary to a soldier more 
than to anyone else, for there is no youth without beauty, and 
the army is the youth of France! It was that beauty, moreover, 
which not only seduces women; but circumstances themselves— 
the rascals—had not been the only protection spread over the 
head of Captain de Brassard. He was, I believe, of Norman 
family, of the race of William the Conqueror, and he had, it is 
said, conquered a good deal himself. After the abdication of the 
Emperor, he had naturally gone over to the Bourbons, and, 
during the Hundred Days, had remained supernaturally faithful 
to them. So, when the Bourbons came back for the second time, 
the Vicomte was made a Chevalier of Saint-Louis and decorated 
by Charles X (then Monsieur) with his own royal hand. During 
the whole time of the Restoration, the handsome de Brassard 
never once mounted Guard at the Tuileries without the Duchesse 
of Angouléme addressing a few gracious words to him as she 
passed. She in whom misfortune had slain graciousness, man- 
aged to find some for him. The Minister, seeing this favour, 
would have done all he could to advance the man whom Madame 
thus singled out; but, with the best will in the world, what could 
be done for this terrible dandy who, at a review, had drawn 
his sword on the inspecting general for having made some re- 
marks about his military duties? It was quite enough to save 
him from a court martial. This careless disdain of discipline 
always distinguished Vicomte de Brassard. 

Except when on a campaign, when he was a thorough officer, 
he was never amenable to discipline. Many times he had been 
known—at the risk of being imprisoned for an indefinite period— 
to have secretly left a garrison, to go and amuse himself in some 
neighbouring town, and only to return when there was a review or 
a parade—warned by one of the soldiers, who loved him, for if 
his superiors scarcely cared to have under their orders a man 


6 THE DIABOLIQUES 


to whom were repugnant all routine and discipline, the soldiers, 
on the other hand, adored him. To them he was an excellent 
officer. He only required that they should be brave, punctilious, 
and careful in their persons and dress, and thus realize the old 
type of the French soldier, as he is depicted in La Permission de 
dix heures, and in two or three old songs which are masterpieces 
in their way. He was, perhaps, too fond of making them fight 
duels, but he asserted that it was the best means he knew to 
develop the military spirit. “I am not the government,’ he 
said, “and I have no medals to give them when they fight bravely 
amongst themselves, but the Orders of which I am the grand- 
master (he had a considerable private fortune) are gloves, spare 
cross-belts, and whatever may spruce them up—so far as the 
regulations will allow.” 

So the company which he commanded eclipsed, in the matter 
of equipment, all the other companies of the Grenadiers of the 
Guard, brilliant as they were. Thus he flattered to excess the 
soldiers, who in France are always prone to fatuity and coquetry, 
two permanent provocations, the one because of its tone, the 
other because of the envy it excites. It will easily be understood, 
after this, that all the other companies were jealous of his. The 
men would fight to get into it, and then had to fight not to get 
out of it. 

Such had been, during the Restoration, the exceptional position 
of Captain Vicomte de Brassard. And as he had not then every 
day, as he had during the Empire, the resource of doing brave 
deeds which would have caused all to be forgiven, no one could 
have foreseen or guessed how long this insubordination which 
astonished his comrades, would have lasted, but the Revolution of 
1830 happened just in time to prevent him from being cashiered. 
He was badly wounded during the Three Days, and disdained to 
take service under the new dynasty of the Orleans, for whom he 
had contempt. When the Revolution of July made them masters 
of a country they did not know how to keep, it found the Captain 
in bed, laid up with an injury to his foot which he had received in 


THE CRIMSON CURTAIN 7 


dancing—as he would have charged—at the last ball of the 
Duchesse de Berry. 

But at the first roll of the drum he, nevertheless, rose and 
joined his company, and as he would not put on his boots on 
account of his wound, he went to the rioting as he would have 
gone to a ball, in varnished shoes and silk socks, and it was thus 
he led his grenadiers to the Place de la Bastille, with instructions 
to clear the whole length of the Boulevards. 

Paris, in which no barricades had yet been erected, had a 
gloomy and terrible appearance. It was deserted. The sun 
glared down, and seemed a fiery rain, soon to be followed by 
another, when from behind the closed shutters of every window 
there should pour a deadly storm. 

Captain de Brassard drew up his men in two Hines as close as 
possible to each row of houses so that each file of en was 
exposed only to the fire from the houses opposite, whilst he, more 
dandified than ever, walked down the middle of the road. 
Aimed at from both sides by thousands of guns, pistols, and 
carbines, all the way from the Bastille to the Rue de Richelieu, 
he was not hit, in spite of the breadth of his chest, of which he 
was perhaps a little too proud—for Captain de Brassard swelled 
out his chest in a fight, as a pretty woman who wants to show 
off her charms does at a ball—when, just as he arrived in front 
of Frascati’s, at the corner of the Rue de Richelieu, and at the 
moment when he commanded the troops to mass together in 
order to carry the first barricade which he had found on his road, 
he received a ball in this magnificent chest, which was doubly 
tempting, both on account of its size and the long silver braid 
which went from one shoulder to the other, and he had also his 
arm broken by a stone—which did not prevent him from carry- 
ing the barricade, and proceeding as far as the Madeleine at the 
head of his excited soldiers. 

There, two ladies in a carriage, who were fleeing from the in- 
surrection in Paris, seeing an officer of the Guards wounded, cov- 
ered with blood, and lying on the blocks of stone which at that 


8 THE DIABOLIQUES 


time surrounded the Madeleine, which was still in course of 
construction, placed their carriage at his disposal, and he was 
taken by them to Gros Caillou, where the Marshal de Raguse 
was, to whom he said, in military fashion: “Marshal, I have 
not, perhaps, more than two hours to live, but during those two 
hours put me wherever you like.” 

Only he was wrong. He was good for more than two hours. 
The ball which passed through his body did not kill him. It was 
more than fifteen years later when I knew him, and he declared 
then that in defiance of all the doctors, who had expressly for- 
bidden him to drink as long as the fever caused by his wound 
continued, he had been saved from a certain death only by Bor- 
deaux wine. 

And how he did drink!—for, dandy as he was, he drank as he 
did everything else—he drank like a trooper. He had made for 
him a splendid goblet of Bohemian glass, which held a whole 
bottle of Bordeaux, by God, and he would drain it off at a 
draught. He would say, after he had drunk it, that he always 
drank like that—and it was true. But in these days, when 
strength of every kind is continually diminishing and is no 
longer thought much of, it may seem that this feat is nothing 
to boast about. He was like Bassompierre, and could take his 
wine as he did. I have seen him toss off his Bohemian glass a 
dozen times without seeming any the worse for it. I have often 
seen him also on those occasions which respectable people call 
“orgies,” and never, after even the most inordinate bouts, did 
he appear to be more than what he called a “little tight.” I 
—who wish to make you understand what sort of man he was, in 
order that you may follow my story—may as well tell you that 
I have known him to keep seven mistresses at the same time. 
He entitled them, poetically, “the seven strings of his lyre”’— 
and I must say that I disapprove of his speaking in this jesting 
and musical way of his immorality. But what would you have? 
If Captain Vicomte de Brassard had not been all that I have had 
the honour to tell you, my story would have been less sensational, 


THE CRIMSON CURTAIN 9 


and probably I should not have thought it worth while to relate it 
to you. 

It is quite certain that I did not expect to find him there when 
I got into the diligence at the Chateau de Rueil cross-roads. It 
was a long time since I had seen him, and I took much pleasure 
in the prospect of spending several hours in the company of a 
man who belonged to our time, and yet differed so much from the 
men of our day. 

The Vicomte de Brassard, who could have worn the armour of 
Francis I as easily as he did the officer’s tunic of the Royal 
Guards, resembled neither in his proportions nor his appearance 
the young men of the present time. This setting sun, so grand 
and radiant, made the rising crescent moons look very pale and 
poor. He had the beauty of the Emperor Nicholas, whom he 
resembled in body, but his face was less ideal and Greek, and he 
wore a short beard, which, like his hair, had remained black in 
some mysterious way, and this beard grew high on his cheeks 
which had a manly ruddy tinge. His forehead was high, project- 
ing, unwrinkled, and as white as a woman’s arm, and beneath 
it were two dark-blue eyes, sparkling like cut emeralds. Those 
eyes never glanced; they penetrated. 

We shook hands, and talked. Captain de Brassard spoke 
slowly, with a resonant voice that was capable of filling the Champ 
de Mars when he gave the word of command. Having been 
brought up from infancy in England, as I have already said, per- 
haps he thought in English, but this slowness, which was devoid 
of embarrassment by the way, gave a distinction to what he said, 
even when he joked, for the Captain loved to joke, and his jokes 
were sometimes rather broad. Captain de Brassard always went 
too far, as the Comtesse de F . . . used to say, that pretty widow 
who since her husband’s death had worn only three colours— 
black, violet, and white. He must have been very good company, 
or people would have thought him impossible, and when that is 
the case, you know that much will be forgiven in the Faubourg 
Saint-Germain. 


10 THE DIABOLIQUES 


One of the advantages of talking in a carriage is that you can 
leave off when you have nothing more to say, without troubling 
anybody. In a drawing-room that liberty does not exist. Po- 
liteness compels you to talk, and this innocent hypocrisy is often 
punished by the hollowness and boredom of the conversation, in 
which the fools, even those born silent (and there are such), do 
their best to say something and be very amiable. In a public 
conveyance you are as much at home as anyone else is—and you 
may without rudeness lapse into the silence and reverie which fol- 
lows a conversation. Unfortunately, the chances are against you 
in this life, and formerly (for there is a “formerly” already) you 
rode twenty times in a public conveyence—as you may now 
twenty times in a railway carriage—without meeting a man whose 
conversation was animated and interesting. 

Vicomte de Brassard and I talked, at first, about the journey, 
the landscape, and old memories of the fashionable world which 
cropped up in the course of conversation—then the sun declined, 
and we both fell into the twilight silence. Night, which in autumn 
seems to fall from the sky at once, it comes so quickly, chilled us, 
and we rolled ourselves in our cloaks, resting our heads against 
the hard corner which is the traveller’s pillow. 

I do not know whether my companion slept in his corner, but 
I was wide awake in mine: I was so well acquainted with the 
route we were travelling, which I had gone over often, that I 
hardly noticed the external objects which disappeared as the dili- 
gence rolled on, and which seemed travelling through the night 
in an opposite direction to us. We passed through several small 
towns dotted here and there along the long road. The night 
became as black as an extinguished stove; and, in this obscurity, 
the unknown towns through which we passed took on a strange 
appearance, and made us think we were at the world’s end. 
In most of these little towns gas-lamps were rare, and 
there was less light than on the country roads behind us. 
In the country the sky was broader and there was a kind of dim 
light, but it was blotted out in the narrow streets of the towns, and 


THE CRIMSON CURTAIN II 


only a star or two was to be seen between the roofs, adding to 
the mysterious air of these sleepy towns, where the only person 
we saw was the ostler with his lantern, at the door of some inn, 
as he brought out the fresh horses and buckled the straps of the 
harness, whistling meanwhile, or swearing at some obstinate or 
skittish horse. 

Except for that, and the eternal question, always the same, 
of some traveller awakened from sleep, who lowered the window 
and cried in a voice which the silence of the night rendered louder: 
“Where are we now, postilion?” no sign of life was heard. 
Nothing was seen but the carriage full of sleeping people, in a 
sleeping town; though perhaps some dreamer like myself would 
try to discern through the window the fronts of the houses, or 
fix his attention and thoughts on some casement still lighted up 
at this late hour, even in those towns where early and regular 
hours are the rule, and the night is specially devoted to sleep. A 
human being watching—even if it be a sentinel—when all others 
are plunged in that rest which comes from physical fatigue, is 
always an affecting sight. But ignorance as to who is watching 
behind the curtains of a window, where the light gleaming be- 
tokens life and thought, adds poetry—the poetry of reality—to 
the dream. At least, for my part, I can never see a window 
lighted up in the night, in a sleeping town through which I am 
passing, without attaching a whole crowd of fancies to that light; 
without imagining behind those curtains all kinds of domestic 
affairs or dramas. Even now, after all these years, I can still 
think of those windows with their eternal and melancholy light, 
and I often say to myself, fancying I see them again in my 
dreams: 

“What can there be behind those curtains?” 

Well, one of those which has remained longest in my memory 
(you will know the reason presently) was a window in one of 
the streets of the town of ****, which we passed that night. 
It was in the third house—you see how exact my memory 1s— 
beyond the inn at which we changed horses; but this window 


12 THE DIABOLIQUES 


I had leisure to examine for longer than a mere change of horses 
would have necessitated. An accident had happened to one of 
the wheels of our coach, and they had to send and wake up the 
wheelwright. Now to wake up a wheelwright in a sleeping town, 
and get him to come and tighten up a nut on a diligence, when 
there is no competition on that line, is not a trifling affair of a 
few minutes. 

In the first place, if the wheelwright was as fast asleep as 
everybody in our coach, it could not have been easy to wake him. 
I could hear, through the partition, the snores of the inside pas- 
sengers, and not one of the outside passengers, who, as you know, 
have a mania for getting down whenever the coach stops, probably 
—for vanity is found everywhere in France, even on the outside of 
coaches—in order to show their agility in getting up again, had 
descended from his seat. 

It is true that the inn at which we were, was shut up. We did 
not sup there. We had supped at the last stage. The inn was 
sleeping like the rest of us. Nothing betrayed a sign of life. 
Not a sound disturbed the profound silence—unless it was the 
wearisome, monotonous sound of a broom wielded by someone 
(man or woman—we knew not, and it was too dark to ascertain) 
who was sweeping out the court-yard of this silent inn, the yard- 
gates of which were usually open. Even the broom dragged as 
though the sweeper were asleep, or were devilishly anxious to 
be. The front of the inn was as black as the other houses in the 
street, where indeed there was only a light at one window—pre- 
cisely that window which is still fixed in my memory. The house, 
in which you could not exactly say that this light shone, for it 
was screened by a double crimson curtain, through whose thick- 
nesses the light filtered mysteriously, was a large building with 
only one upper story, but that placed very high. 

“It is very singular,” said Vicomte de Brassard, as though he 
were talking to himself; “one would think it was still the same 
curtain!” 


THE CRIMSON CURTAIN 13 


I turned towards him to look at him, but the lamp which was 
by the coachman’s box, and which is intended to show the horses 
the road, had just gone out. I thought he was asleep, but he 
was not, and he had been struck, like me, by the appearance of 
the window; but he knew more than I, because he knew why it 
was lighted up. 

But the tone in which he had said that—though it was a simple 
remark—was so unlike the voice of the worldly Vicomte de Bras- 
sard, and astonished me so much, that I was overcome by curios- 
ity to see his face, and I struck a match, as though I had wanted 
to light a cigar. The blue flame of the match lit up the gloom. 

He was pale—not pale as a dead man, but as pale as Death 
itself. 

Why should he turn pale? This window, with its peculiar ap- 
pearance, the remark, and the pallor of a man who very rarely 
turned pale, for he was full-blooded, and emotion, when he was 
moved, made him turn scarlet up to the crown of his head, the 
shiver that I felt run down the muscles of his powerful biceps, 
which, as we were sitting close together, was against my arm— 
all gave me the impression that there was something hidden 
that I, the seeker after stories, might perhaps learn with a little 
pains. 

“You were looking then at that window, Captain, and even 
seemed to recognize it,” I said in that tone which does not seem 
to court a reply, and is the hypocrisy of curiosity. 

“Parbleu! I do recognize it,” he replied in his rich, deep voice, 
seeming to dwell on every word. 

Calmness had again resumed its sway over this dandy, the most 
stolid and majestic of all dandies, who—as you know—scorn all 
emotions as being beneath them, and do not believe, like that 
idiot Goethe, that astonishment can ever be a proper feeling for 
the human mind. 

“I do not come by here often,” continued the Vicomte de Bras- 
sard quietly; “I even avoid passing by here. But there are some 


14 THE DIABOLIQUES 


things one never forgets. There are not many, but there are 
some. I know of three: the first uniform one puts on, the first 
battle one was in, the first woman one ever slept with. Well, for 
me that window is the fourth thing I cannot forget.” 

He stopped and lowered the window which was in front of him. 
Was it that he might the better see the window of which we 
spoke? 

The conductor had gone for the wheelwright, and had not re- 
turned. The fresh horses were late, and had not yet come. 
Those which had brought us were motionless from fatigue, worn 
out, and not unharnessed, and, with their heads between their 
legs, they did not even stamp on the silent pavement with impa- 
tience to return to their stable. Our sleepy diligence resembled 
an enchanted coach, fixed by some fairy’s wand in some open 
glade in the forest of the Sleeping Beauty. 

“The fact is,” I said, “that for any man with imagination, that 
window possesses a certain character” 

“I don’t know what it has for you,” replied Vicomte de Bras- 
sard, “but I know what it has for me. That is the window of 
the room in which I lived when I was first in garrison. Confound 
it! that is fully thirty-five years ago! 

“Behind that curtain—which does not seem to have changed in 
all those years—and which is now lighted as it was when——” 

He stopped and left his thought unexpressed, but I was deter- 
mined to make him speak out. 

“When you were studying tactics, Captain; in those early days 
when you were a second lieutenant.” 

“You give me more than my due,” he replied. “I was, it is 
true, a second lieutenant at that time, but I did not spend my 
nights in studying tactics, and if my light was burning at unac- 
customed hours, as respectable people say, it was not to read 
Marshal Saxe.” 

“But,” I said—quick as a ball from a racket—“it was perhaps 
to imitate him.” 

He returned the ball as promptly. 


y 


THE CRIMSON CURTAIN 15 


“Oh,” he said, “it was not then that I imitated Marshal Saxe 
in the way you mean. That was not till much later. Then I 
was merely a brat of a second lieutenant, very stiff and prim in 
my uniform, but very awkward and timid with women, though 
they would never believe it—probably on account of my con- 
founded face. I never got the full benefit of my timidity from 
them. Moreover, I was but seventeen in those happy days. I 
had just left the military college. We left in those days at the age 
at which you enter nowadays, for if the Emperor, that terrible 
consumer of men, had lasted longer, he would have ended by 
having soldiers twelve years of age, de some of the Asiatic sultans 
have concubines nine years of age.” 

“If he goes on talking about the Emperor and concubines,” 
I thought to myself, “I shall not learn what I want to know.” 

“Yet, Vicomte,” I replied, “I would wager that you would never 
have preserved the memory of that window which is shining 
there unless there had been a woman behind the curtain.” 

“And you would have won your bet, sir,” he said, gravely. 

“Ah, parbleu!” I replied. “I was sure of it. For a man like 
you, in a little provincial town that you have not perhaps passed 
through ten times since you were first in garrison there, it must 
be some siege you have sustained, or some woman you took by 
storm, that could make you remember so vividly the window of 
a house that is now lighted up amidst the general gloom.” 

“Yet I did not, however, sustain any siege—at least in the mili- 
tary sense,” he replied, still gravely, but gravity was sometimes 
his way of joking; “and, on the other hand, when one surrenders 
so quickly, can it be called a siege? But as to taking a woman, 
by storm or otherwise, I have told you that in those days I was 
quite incapable of it. So it was not a woman who was taken 
here—it was I.” 

I bowed; did he see it in the dark carriage? 

“Berg op Zoom was taken,” I said. 

“And subalterns of seventeen,” he replied, “are not generally 
Berg op Zooms of impregnable wisdom and chastity.” 


16 THE DIABOLIQUES 


“So,” I said gaily, “it was some Madame or Mademoiselle 
Potiphar.” 

“It was a demoiselle,” he interrupted with a frankness that 
was almost comic. 

“To add to the sum of all the others, Captain. Only in this 
case the Joseph was a soldier—a Joseph not likely to run away.” 

“But who certainly did run away, on the contrary,” he replied 
with the greatest coolness; “although too late, and very much 
afraid!!! With a fright which made me understand the expres- 
sion used by Marshal Ney, which I heard with my own ears, and 
which, coming from such a man, I must own somewhat com- 
forted me, I should like to see the b [only he gave the words 
in full] who has never been afraid!” 

“The story of how you came to feel that sensation must be 
interesting, Captain.” 

“Pardieu!” he said quickly; “I can, if you are curious, tell you 
the story of an event which bit into my life as acid bites into 
steel, and which has left a dark stain on the page of my libertine 
pleasures.—Ah, it is not always profitable to be a rake,” he 
added in a melancholy voice, which struck "me as rather strange 
coming from one I had always regarded as a regular hardened 
rogue. 

He pulled up the glass he had lowered, as though he feared 
the sound of his voice might be heard outside, though there was 
no one near the coach, which was motionless as though deserted— 
or else he thought the regular beat of the broom would interrupt 
his story. I listened attentively to his voice—to the slightest ex- 
pression of his voice—for I could not see his face in the dark— 
and with my eyes fixed more than ever on the window with the 
crimson curtain, behind which the light still burned with such 
fascinating power, and about which he was ready to speak. 

“I was then seventeen,” he continued, “and had just left the 
military college. I had been appointed ensign in a regiment of 
the line, which was then impatiently awaiting orders to leave for 
Germany, where the Emperor was conducting that campaign 





THE CRIMSON CURTAIN 17 


which history has named the campaign of 1813. I had just time 
to kiss my old father before joining, in this town, the battalion 
of which I formed part—for in this little town of some few thou- 
sands of inhabitants at most, the garrison consisted of only our 
two first battalions. The two other battalions were in some 
neighbouring town. 

“You, who have probably seen this town only when you were 
travelling towards the West, cannot imagine what it is—or at 
least what it was thirty years ago—when you are obliged, as I 
was then, to live in it. It was certainly the worst garrison to 
which chance—which I believe to be the devil, at that time repre- 
sented by the Minister of War—could have sent me as a starting- 
place for my military career. What an infernally dull hole it 
was! I do not remember ever having been in a more wearisome 
place. But, at my age, and in the first intoxication of the uni- 
form—a feeling you do not know, but which all who have worn 
it have experienced—lI scarcely suffered from what at a later time 
would have seemed insupportable. 

“After all, how could this dull provincial town affect me? I 
lived in it much less than I did in my uniform—a masterpiece 
of sartorial art which delighted me. My uniform, of which I was 
madly fond, hid or adorned everything, and it was—though this 
may appear an exaggeration, but it is the truth—the uniform 
which was, strictly speaking, my garrison. When I was too much 
bored by this uninteresting and lifeless town, I put on full uni- 
form, and boredom fled. I was like those women who give extra 
attention to their toilette when they are alone and expect no one. 
I dressed myself for myself. I enjoyed in solitude my epaulets 
and the clank of my sabre, as I promenaded the lonely streets 
in the afternoons, and I felt as puffed up with pride as I have done 
since in Paris when I have heard people say behind me: ‘There 
is a really fine-looking officer.’ 

“In the town, which was not a rich one, and had no commerce 
or activity of any kind, there were only a few old and almost 
ruined families who grumbled at the Emperor, because he had 


18 THE DIABOLIQUES 


not, as they said, made the robbers of the Revolution yield up 
their booty, and who for that reason paid no great heed to the 
officers. ‘Therefore there were no parties, or balls, or soirées, 
or dances. At the best there was but the Promenade, where 
on Sunday, after church, the mothers came to show off their 
daughters until two o’clock in the afternoon—and when the first 
bell rang for Vespers all the petticoats disappeared, and the 
Promenade was deserted. 

“This midday Mass, to which we never go, became, by the way, 
a military Mass during the Restoration, and all the officers were 
obliged to attend it, and that was quite an event in this dead-alive 
town. For young fellows like us, who were at a time of life when 
we care greatly for love or women, this military Mass was quite 
a pleasure. All the officers, except those on duty, were scattered 
about the nave of the church. We nearly always contrived to 
sit behind the prettiest women who came to Mass, because they 
were sure to be looked at, and whom we delighted by talking be- 
tween ourselves, loud enough for them to hear, about their charms 
or appearance. Ah, that military Mass, what romances have I 
seen begin there! I have seen many love-letters slipped into the 
muffs which the girls left on their chairs when they knelt by the 
side of their mothers—letters to which they brought the reply 
on the following Sunday, also in their muffs. 

“But in the days of the Emperor there was no military Mass, 
and consequently no means of approaching the ‘respectable’ girls 
of the little town. Nor were there any compensations. Those 
establishments which are never mentioned in good society were 
simply horrible. The cafés, in which so much home-sickness is 
drowned during the long idlenesses of garrison life, it was impos- 
sible for anyone who respected his epaulets to enter. 

“Luxury is now found here, as elsewhere, but there was not 
then a single hotel where the officers could dine together without 
being horribly swindled, so we were forced to give up all ideas of 
a mess-table, and we were scattered about various boarding- 
houses, amongst households that were not over-rich—people who 


THE CRIMSON CURTAIN 19 


let their apartments as dearly as they could, and so added a little 
to their skimpy revenues. 

“T lived in lodgings. One of my comrades lived at the Poste aux 
Chevaux, which was in this street at that time—there! a few 
houses behind us, and if it were daylight you could see on the 
house an old golden sun emerging from a cherry-coloured cloud, 
with the inscription, “The Rising Sun” This comrade found an 
apartment for me close to his own—where that window is perched 
up there, and which seems to me this evening to belong to me 
still, as it did then. I let him find my lodgings for me. He was 
older than I was, had been longer in the regiment, and he liked 
to give advice to one who was inexperienced and careless. 

“I have already said that except for the uniform—a point on 
which I lay stress, because that is a feeling of which your gen- 
eration, with your Peace Congresses, and philosophical and hu- 
manitarian clowning, will soon have no idea—and the hope of 
hearing the cannon in my first battle, in which I was to lose my 
military maidenhead—excuse the expression—it was all much 
alike to me. I lived only in those two ideas—in the second es- 
pecially, for it was a hope, and we always care more for what we 
have not than for that which we have. 

“This is how I spent my life. Except during meal-times—and 
I took my meals with the people of the house, and about whom 
I will tell you presently—and the time devoted daily to military 
duties, I lived nearly always in my own room, lying on a huge 
dark-blue sofa, which was so cool that it seemed to me like a cold 
bath after the hot parade-ground, and I scarcely ever left this 
sofa except to take a fencing-lesson, or have a game of cards with 
my neighbour opposite, Louis de Meung, who was not so lazy 
as I was, for he had picked up, amongst the grisettes of the town, 
a rather pretty girl, whom he had taken for his mistress and who 
served, as he said, to kill time. 

“But what I knew of women did not tempt me to imitate my 
friend Louis. What little I knew of them I had picked up where 
the cadets of Saint-Cyr acquire that information when they are 


20 THE DIABOLIQUES 


out on leave. Besides, some phases of character are late in de- 
veloping. Did you know Saint-Rémy, one of the greatest rakes of 
his day, and who was called by the other libertines ‘the Minotaur’; 
not because of his horns, although he wore them, for he had killed 
his wife’s lover, but because of the number of virgins he had 
destroyed?” | 

“Yes, I knew him,” I replied, “but when he was old and incor- 
rigible, and becoming more of a debauchee each year that passed 
over his head; of course I knew that rompu, as Brantôme would 
have called him.” 

“He was, in fact, like one of Brantôme’s men,” replied the 
Vicomte. “But, at any rate, Saint-Rémy, when he was twenty- 
seven, had never touched a glass or a petticoat. He will tell you 
the same thing if you ask him. At twenty-seven years of age, 
he was, in the matter of women, as innocent as a new-born babe, 
and though his nurse no longer suckled him, he had never drunk 
anything but milk or water.” 

“He made up well for lost time,” I remarked. 

“Yes,” said the Vicomte, “and so did I. But I had less lost 
time to make up. My first period of prudence hardly exceeded 
the time that I spent in this town, and although I was not so 
absolutely chaste as Saint-Rémy, I lived like a Knight of Malta 
—and indeed I was one, by birth—Did you know that? I 
should even have succeeded one of my uncles as a ‘Master’ if the 
Revolution had not abolished the Order, the ribbon of which— 
though the Order is abolished—I sometimes wear—foolishly per- 
haps.—As to the people who had let me their apartment,” con- 
tinued Vicomte de Brassard, “they were, as you may imagine, 
thoroughly bourgeois. They were only two—husband and wife; 
both old, and well-behaved. In their relations with me, they even 
displayed that politeness you never find in these days—especially 
in their class—and which is like the scent of a bygone period. 
I was not of an age to observe, and they interested me so little 
that I never cared to penetrate the past of these two old people, 


THE CRIMSON CURTAIN 21 


into whose life I entered only in the most superficial way, two 
hours a day—noon and evening—when I dined or supped with 
them. Nothing concerning this past transpired in their conver- 
sation before me, for this conversation generally turned on per- 
sons or matters relating to the town, of which they informed me 
—the husband in a spirit of humorous backbiting, and his wife, 
who was very pious, with more reserve, but certainly with no 
less pleasure. 

“T think, however, I have heard it said that the husband 
travelled in his youth, but for whom or what I know not, and 
that when he returned, he married—the girl having waited for 
him. They were good, honest people, calm and quiet. The wife 
spent her time in knitting socks for her husband, and he, being 
music-mad, scraped old airs on his violin in a garret over my 
room. Perhaps they had once been better off. Perhaps some 
loss of fortune (which they concealed) had obliged them to take 
a lodger; but, except for that, they showed no sign of poverty. 
Everything in the house breathed an air of comfort, as is the case 
in old-fashioned houses, which abound with linen that smells fresh 
and good, heavy silver plate, and movables which seem to be 
immovable, they are so seldom renewed. I was very comfortable 
there. The table was good, and I had full permission to quit it 
as soon as I had ‘wiped my beard’—as old Olive, the servant 
who waited on us, called it, though she did me too much honour 
in dignifying by the name of a beard the cat’s whiskers which 
constituted the moustache of an ensign who was still a growing lad. 

“I had been there about six months, living as quietly as my 
hosts, and I had never heard a single word of the existence of 
the person I was about to meet at their house, when one day, in 
going down to dinner at the accustomed hour, I saw, in a corner 
of the dining-room, a tall young woman standing on tiptoe and 
hanging her hat by its ribbons on a hat-rack, like a woman who 
feels herself quite at home, and has just come in from a walk. 
Her body was stretched to reach the peg, which was placed 


22 THE DIABOLIQUES 


high, and she displayed a figure as graceful as an opera-dancer. 
She was dressed in a tight-fitting bodice and a narrow skirt, which 
revealed the shape of her hips. 

“With the arms still raised, she turned her head when she heard 
me enter, and thus I was enabled to see her face; but she finished 
what she was about as though I had not been there, and looked 
to see whether the ribbons of her bonnet had not crumpled in 
hanging it up, and she did all this slowly, carefully, and almost 
impertinently—for, after all, I was standing waiting to bow to 
her—before she took any notice of me, and did me the honour to 
regard me with two very cold, black eyes, to which her hair, 
which was done in wavy curls massed on the forehead, gave that 
deep expression which is peculiar to that kind of coiffure. 

“I could not imagine who she could be at that hour, and in 
that place. No one ever came to dine with my hosts—yet she 
had certainly come to dine, for the table was prepared, and four 
covers were laid. But my astonishment to see her there was 
greatly surpassed by my astonishment to learn who she was; as 
I did when my hosts entered the room and presented her to me 
as their daughter, who had just left boarding-school, and who 
was going in future to live with them. 

“Their daughter! It was impossible for anyone to be more 
unlike the daughter of people like them! Not but what the 
prettiest girls are the daughters of all sorts of people. I have 
known many such, and you also, no doubt. Physiologically speak- 
ing, the ugliest being may produce the most beautiful. But there 
was the chasm of a whole race between her and them! More- 
over, physiologically, if I may employ that pedantic word, which 
belongs to your days and not to mine, one could not help remark- 
ing her air, which was very singular in a girl as young as she 
was, for it was a kind of impassive air very difficult to describe. 
If she had not had it, one would have said: ‘That is a pretty 
girl without thinking any more of her than of all the pretty 
girls one meets by chance, and about whom one has said that 
and never thought any more about it. But this air—which dis- 


THE CRIMSON CURTAIN 23 


tinguished her not only from her parents, but from everyone else, 
amazed you and petrified you; for she appeared to have neither 
passions nor feelings. “The Infanta with the Spaniel,’ by Velas- 
quez, may, if you know the picture, give you an idea of that air, 
which was neither proud, nor scornful, nor disdainful, but simply 
impassive; for a proud, scornful, or contemptuous air informs 
people that they do exist, since one takes the trouble to despise 
or contemn them, whilst this air said coolly: ‘For me, you do 
not even exist.’ 

“I own that her appearance made me put to myself on that 
first day and many others, a question which is still unsolved: 
how that tall, slim girl could be the offspring of the little, stout 
man in a greenish-yellow coat and a white waistcoat, who had 
a complexion the colour of his wife’s jam, and a wen on the back 
of his fat neck, and stuttered in his speech. And if the husband 
did not trouble me much, for the husband may be eliminated 
from questions of this sort—the wife appeared quite impossible 
to explain. Mademoiselle Albertine (that was the name of this 
archduchess who had fallen from heaven into this bourgeois family, 
as though heaven had tried to play a joke upon them) was called 
Alberte by her parents, because her name was too long. The 
name suited her face and figure, but she did not appear to be the 
daughter of either of her parents. 

“At this first dinner, and those which followed, she appeared 
to me to be a young girl very well brought up, with no affectation, 
and habitually silent, but who, when she did speak, said clearly 
and sensibly what she had to say, and never exceeded those limits. 
Besides, if she had had more wit than I knew of, she would hardly 
have found an opportunity to show it at the dinner-table. The 
presence of their daughter necessarily had some effect on the 
gossip of the two old people. All the little scandals about the 
townsfolk were suppressed. As a matter of course, we never 
talked about anything more interesting than the weather. There 
was only the impassive air of Mademoiselle Albertine or Alberte, 
which had so much struck me at first, and I soon wearied of 


24 THE DIABOLIQUES 


that. If I had met her in that society for which I was intended, 
her impassiveness would have aroused my curiosity. But to me 
she was not a girl to whom I could make love—even with the 
eyes. My position in respect to her—as I was living with her 
parents—was delicate, and a mere trifle might have made it much 
worse. She was neither sufficiently near nor sufficiently remote 
to be anything in my life, and I soon fell naturally, and quite 
unintentionally, into the most complete indifference to her 
impassiveness. 

“Nor was this disturbed either on her part or on mine. There 
was nothing between us but the merest politeness, and the most 
indifferent speeches. To me she was just a figure that I scarcely 
saw—and what was I to her? At table—we never met elsewhere 
—she looked more at the stopper of the decanter or the sugar- 
basin than she did at me. All that she said was correct, and 
very well expressed, but signified little or nothing, and gave me 
no clue to her character. Besides, what did that matter to me? 
I should have passed my whole life without dreaming of even 
looking at that quiet and insolent girl, had it not been for a 
circumstance about which I will tell you, and which struck me 
like a thunderbolt—a bolt from the blue, indeed. 

“One evening, nearly a month after Mademoiselle Alberte had 
come home, we were sitting down to supper. She was seated 
next to me, and I really paid so little attention to her that I 
had never noticed that she had changed her place, and was next 
to me instead of sitting between her father and mother as usual. 
I was unfolding my napkin on my knees when—I shall never be 
able to express my feeling of astonishment—I felt a hand boldly 
press mine under the table. I thought I was dreaming—or, 
rather, I could think of nothing at all. I could only feel the touch 
of that hand, boldly seeking mine under the napkin. It was so 
extraordinary and unexpected. All my blood, set aglow by that 
touch, rushed from my heart to my hand, as though attracted by 
her, and then returned violently as though driven by a pump to 
my heart. Everything swam before my eyes—my ears tingled. 


THE CRIMSON CURTAIN 25 


I must have turned deadly pale. I thought I was going to faint 
—that I should melt away in the inexpressible pleasure caused by 
the pressure of that hand,—which was rather large and strong, 
like that of a boy—when it closed upon mine. 

“When you are young, you know, pleasure always brings with 
it a sense of shame, and I tried to withdraw my hand, but hers 
seemed aware of the pleasure it had caused me, and compelled 
mine to remain by a deliciously warm squeeze. . . . That is thirty- 
five years ago, and, as you may believe, I have touched many a 
woman’s hand since, but I still feel, when I think of it, the sensa- 
tion of that hand pressing mine with despotic passion. 

“The thousand tremors which that hand caused to shoot through 
my whole body made me fear to betray what I felt to the father 
and mother whose daughter, before their eyes, dared to... 
Ashamed, however, to prove myself less of a man than this bold 
girl who risked her reputation, and whose incredible coolness 
concealed her follies, I bit my lips till they bled, in a superhuman 
effort to stop the tremors of desire which might have told these 
poor people so much, and then my eyes sought her other hand, 
which 1 had not yet looked at, and which at this dangerous 
moment was calmly turning up the wick of a lamp which had 
just been placed on the table, for the evening was beginning to 
grow dark. I looked at it. It was the fellow of the hand whose 
touch was thrilling me, and sending long tongues of fire as from a 
furnace through my veins! The hand was rather thick, but the 
fingers were long and well-shaped, and looked transparently rosy 
in the light which fell full upon them, but they never trembled, 
and performed the little operation on which they were engaged 
with firmness, ease, and an incomparable, graceful languor. 

“We could not stop like that for ever! We needed our hands 
to eat with. Mademoiselle Alberte’s hand dropped mine, but at 
the same moment her foot, which was quite as expressive as her 
hand, placed itself on mine in the same despotic manner during 
all this too brief dinner, and reminded me of one of those baths 
which are insufferably hot to begin with, but to which you get 


26 THE DIABOLIQUES 


accustomed, and end by thinking so comfortable that you willingly 
believe that the damned in their cauldron must be as cool and as 
much at home as fish in water. 

“You may fancy whether I dined that day, or if I took much 
part in the chatter of my worthy hosts, who were far from sus- 
pecting the mysterious and terrible drama which was going on 
under the table. They saw nothing, but they easily might have 
seen, and really I was more disturbed on their account than I was 
for myself, or for her. I had all the frankness and sympathy of 
seventeen. I said to myself: ‘Is she quite shameless? Is she 
mad?” And I looked out of the corner of my eye at her, but she 
did not lose for a single second, during the whole of the dinner, 
her air of a princess at a state ceremony, and her face remained 
as calm as ever, though her foot was saying and doing all the 
foolish things which a foot can say or do—to mine. I must con- 
fess that I was more surprised at her coolness than at her im- 
prudence. I had read a good deal of light literature, in which 
women were not spared. I had been educated at a military 
school. I considered myself quite a Lovelace, like every lad who 
has kissed his mother’s chambermaid behind the door or on the 
staircase. But my experience as a Lovelace of seventeen was 
upset. This appeared to me worse than anything I had ever 
heard or read about the deceit of women, and how they could 
conceal their deepest or most violent emotions. Only fancy! 
she was but eighteen! Was she even as much? She had just 
left a school which I had no reason to suspect, considering the 
morality and the piety of her mother, who had selected it for 
her daughter. This absence of all constraint, or, to speak plainly, 
this absolute want of modesty, this perfect control over herself 
whilst doing the most imprudent things that could be done by a 
youny girl who had never by a sign or a glance forewarned the 
man to whom she made such an advance—all this rose clearly 
to my mind, despite my confusion. 

“But neither then nor later did I stop to philosophize about it. 
I had no sham horror for the conduct of this girl who had shown 


THE CRIMSON CURTAIN 27 


such terribly precocious depravity. Besides, at the age I was 
then, or even much later, you do not consider a girl depraved 
because she throws herself into your arms. On the contrary, you 
are almost inclined to regard it as a matter of course, and if you 
say ‘Poor girl,’ it is more out of modesty than pity. But though 
I was shy, I did not want to be taken for a ninny—the good old 
French reason for doing a bad deed without any remorse. I 
knew without doubt that it was not love the girl felt for me. 
Love does not act in that shameless, impudent way; and I also 
knew well enough that what she had caused me to feel was not 
love either. But, love or not—whatever it was, I wanted it. 
When I rose from the table, my mind was made up. Alberte’s 
hand, of which I had not thought for a moment before it seized 
mine, had stirred in my soul a desire to embrace her whole body 
as her hand had embraced mine! 

“I went up to my room like a madman, and when I was a little 
bit calmed by reflection, I asked myself what I should do to 
clinch this ‘intrigue’-—as they call it in the country—with a girl 
who was so devilishly tempting. I knew pretty well—like one 
who has never tried to know more—that she never left her mother, 
and that the two worked side by side all day in the window-seat 
of the dining-room, which also served as their drawing-room; 
that she had no lady-friend who came to see her, and that she 
hardly ever went out except to Mass or Vespers on Sunday, with 
her parents. 

“That was not very encouraging, was it? I began to regret that 
I had not seen more of these worthy people; for though I had 
not held aloof from them, I had treated them with that distant 
or somewhat listless politeness you show to people in whom you 
take only a remote interest; but I reflected that I could not very 
well change my attitude towards them without exposing myself 
to the chance of revealing to them, or making them suspect, that 
which I wished to conceal. 

“The only opportunities I had to speak to Mademoiselle Alberte 
in secret were meetings on the staircase, as ] went up or came 


28 THE DIABOLIQUES 


down from my room—but on the staircase we might be seen and 
heard. The best resource open to me—in that small and well- 
regulated house where everybody was close to everybody else’s 
elbow—was to write; and since the hand of that brazen hussy 
knew so well how to find mine under the table, it would perhaps 
not make much ado about taking a note that was slipped into it; 
and so I wrote. 

“It was a letter suited to the circumstances—supplicatory, com- 
manding, and delirious—of a man who has drunk his first draught 
of happiness and asks for a second. 

“Only, in order to give it to her, I must wait till dinner-time 
the next day, and that seemed a long time; but at last dinner-time 
came! The incentive hand, whose touch I had felt for twenty- 
four hours, did not fail to seek mine under the table as on the 
previous evening. Mademoiselle Alberte felt my letter, and took 
it, as I foresaw. But what I did not foresee was, that with that 
Infanta-like air of sublime indifference, she should slip it into 
her breast, under the pretence of arranging a bit of lace that was 
doubled down, and perform the act so naturally and so quickly 
that her mother, who was engaged in serving the soup, saw noth- 
ing; and whilst her old idiot of a father, who was always hum- 
ming something, and thinking of his violin when he was not 
playing, was gazing into the fire.” 

“Oh, that is done every day, Captain,” I interrupted gaily, 
for his story appeared to me to be likely to turn soon into a mere 
history of a garrison love-affair—for I did not suspect what was 
to follow. “Why, only a few days ago there was at the opera, in 
the box next to mine, a lady of probably the same sort as your 
Mademoiselle Alberte. She was more than eighteen, certainly; 
but, I give you my word of honour, I have rarely seen more majes- 
tic modesty in any woman. During the whole performance she 
sat as motionless as though she had been on a granite pedestal. 
She did not turn once, either to the right or left, but no doubt she 
saw with her shoulders, which were very bare and very beautiful, 
for there was in the same box with me, and consequently behind 


THE CRIMSON CURTAIN 29 


us both, a young man who appeared quite as indifferent as she 
was to everything but the opera that was being sung. I can 
certify that this young man had not made one of those grimaces 
which men make to women in public places, and which you may 
call declarations from a distance. Only, when the piece was over, 
and amid the general confusion as the boxes emptied, the lady 
rose and buttoned her cloak, and I heard her say to her husband 
in a clear and conjugally imperious voice, ‘Henri, pick up my 
hood! and then over his back, as he was stooping down, she ex- 
tended her hand and arm, and took a note the young man handed 
her, just as though she had been taking her fan or her bouquet 
from her husband’s hand. He rose up, poor man! holding the 
hood—a scarlet satin hood, but not so scarlet as his face, for 
which he had, at the risk of apoplexy, dived under the seats as he 
best could. Upon my word, when I saw that, I went away think- 
ing that, instead of giving it to his wife, he ought to have kept 
that hood to hide his own head in, for the horns were about to 
sprout.” 

“Your story is a good one,” said Vicomte de Brassard calmly, 
and at another time I should have enjoyed it more—but allow me 
to finish my tale. I confess that with a girl of that sort I was 
not for a moment doubtful of the fate of my letter. She might 
be tied to her mother’s apron-strings, but she would find means 
to read my letter and reply to it. I even expected a long cor- 
respondence, carried on under the table as we had begun, and 
when the next day I entered the dining-room, firmly convinced in 
my own mind that I was about to have a reply to my letter of the 
previous evening, I thought my eyes must have played me a trick 
when I saw that the covers had been changed, and that Made- 
moiselle Alberte was placed, where she always ought to have 
been, between her father and mother. 

“What was the meaning of this change? Did her father and 
_ mother suspect anything? Mademoiselle Alberte was opposite to 
me, and I looked at her with that fixed expression which demands 
an answer. ‘There were twenty-five notes of interrogation in my 


? 


30 THE DIABOLIQUES 


eyes; but hers were as calm, as silent, as indifferent as usual. 
They looked at me as though they did not see me. I have never 
seen a look more annoying than that long calm gaze, which fell 
on you as though you were an inanimate object. I boiled with 
curiosity, vexation, impatience, and many other emotions—and | 
could not understand how it was that this girl, who was so sure of 
herself, did not dare to give me a sign which would warn me, or 
make me guess, or tell me, that we understood each other, and 
that we were conniving or conspiring together in the same mys- 
tery, whether it was love or something else. 

“I asked myself if it could be really the same girl who had 
touched my hand and foot under the table; who had received the 
letter the previous evening and had slipped it so cleverly into her 
breast, before her parents, as she would have placed a flower there. 
She had done so much already that she need not have been em- 
barrassed to give me a glance. But no! I had nothing. The din- 
ner passed without that glance for which I was watching and 
waiting. ‘She must have found some means to reply to me,’ I 
said to myself as I left the table and went up to my room, not 
believing that such a woman would retreat after such an incredible 
advance—not admitting that fear or prudence could stand be- 
tween her and her fancies, and parbleu! frankly refusing to 
acknowledge that she had not a fancy for me. 

“If her parents have no suspicion,’ I said to myself, ‘if it is by 
chance that she has changed her place at the table, to-morrow 
I shall find her by my side again/—But on the morrow, and on 
the following days, I was not seated near Mademoiselle Alberte, 
who continued to wear the same incomprehensible look, and to 
say the same ordinary phrases in the same impassive way. 

“You may well imagine that I observed her with much interest. 
She appeared as undisturbed as possible, whilst I was horribly 
annoyed, even to anger—an anger that I was forced to conceal! 
This air, which she never lost, made me seem farther away from 
her than ever. I was so exasperated that in the end I did not 
fear to compromise her by looking at her, and fixing on her im- 


THE CRIMSON CURTAIN 31 


penetrable eyes the earnest, burning gaze of mine. Was it a 
clever manceuvre on her part? Was it coquetry? Was it but one 
caprice following another—or simply stupidity? ‘If one knew the 
right moment!’ as Ninon used to say. Had the right moment 
already passed? 

“However, I still waited—for what?—a word, a sign—so easily 
given as we pushed the chairs back when we rose from dinner— 
and as that did not come, all the most foolish and absurd ideas 
began to fill my head. I imagined that because of the difficulties 
which surrounded us in the house, she would write to me by post 
—she was quite cunning enough to slip a letter into the box when 
she was out with her mother—and impressed by that idea, my 
blood boiled twice a day, an hour before the postman passed. 
Ten times a day did I ask the old servant, in a voice choked with 
emotion: ‘Are there any letters for me, Olive?’ to which she re- 
plied imperturbably: ‘No, sir, there are not.’ 

“Finally the anxiety grew too intense. Desire deceived turned 
to hate. I began to hate Alberte, and to explain to myself her 
conduct towards me by motives which would cause me to despise 
her, for hate needs scorn. ‘Cowardly little wretch, she is afraid 
to write,’ I said to myself. I endeavoured not to think of her, 
and I heaped abuse upon her when I spoke of her, to Louis de 
Meung—for I did tell him about her, for she had extinguished all 
my sense of chivalry, and I related the whole adventure to my 
friend, who twisted his long fair moustache whilst he listened to 
me, and who frankly replied—for we were not moralists in 
the 27th: 

‘Do as I do. One nail drives out another. Take one of the 
little sempstresses of the town for a mistress, and think no more 
about the young devil.’ 

“But I did not follow his advice. I had too much at stake. If 
I had taken a mistress, and she had known of it, I might have 
aroused her vanity or her jealousy. But she would not know it. 
How should she? If I had brought home some woman to my 
lodgings, as Louis did, I should have embroiled myself with the 


a2 THE DIABOLIQUES 


worthy people of the house, who would at once have requested 
me to look out for other apartments, and I was not willing to 
give up the chance of again meeting the hand or the foot of that 
confounded Alberte, who, after all she had dared to do, still re- 
mained ‘Mademoiselle Impassible.’ 

““Call her, rather, impossible,’ said Louis, who made fun of me. 

“À whole month passed, and in spite of my resolutions to forget 
Alberte, and to seem as indifferent as she was—to oppose marble 
to marble, and coldness to coldness—my whole life was passed 
on the watch—which I detest, even when I am shooting. Yes, 
sir, my days were spent on the watch. I was on the watch when 
I went down to dinner, and hoped to find her alone in the dining- 
room as on the first occasion. On the watch during dinner, when 
she met my eyes with a calm cold gaze which did not avoid mine, 
or reply to it either. On the watch after dinner, when I remained 
a little time to see the two women resume their work in the 
window-seat; hoping that she would drop something—her thimble, 
or scissors, or a bit of work—that I could pick up, and in restor- 
ing touch her hand—that hand which burned into my brain! On 
the watch when I had regained my own room, and thought I 
heard in the corridor the foot which had pressed on mine so firmly. 
On the watch on the staircase, where I hoped I might meet her, 
and where old Olive discovered me one day, to my great confusion. 
On the watch at my window—the window you see—where I 
planted myself when she was going out with her mother, and 
from which I did not budge until she returned; but which was as 
useless as all the rest. When she went out—wearing a shawl with 
red and white stripes, printed with black and yellow flowers— 
she never once turned; and when she returned, still by her 
mother’s side, she never raised her head or her eyes to the window 
where I was awaiting her. 

“Such were the miserable practices to which she had condemned 
me. Of course I know that women make lackeys of us—but not 
to that extent. Ah, I no longer took pleasure in my uniform! 
When the duties of the day were over—after the drill or the 


THE CRIMSON CURTAIN 33 


parade—I returned home quickly, but not to read a pile of 
memoirs or novels, my sole reading at that time. I never went 
to see Louis de Meung. I never touched the foils. I had not 
even the resource of tobacco which deadens the nerves, and which 
you young men of the present day use. We did not smoke then 
in the 27th, or only the privates did in the guard-room, when 
they played cards on the head of the drum. The only exercise 
I took was to tramp up and down the six feet of clear space in 
my room, like a caged lioness that smells raw meat. 

“And if it were so in the day, it was also the same for a great 
part of the night. I went to bed late. I did not sleep. That 
infernal Alberte kept me awake. She had kindled a fire in my 
veins, and then gone away—like an incendiary who does not even 
turn his head to see the flames burst forth behind him. In the 
evening, I lowered, as it is now’—here the Vicomte passed his 
glove over the coach-window, to wipe away the moisture—“the 
same crimson curtain in front of the same window, and which was 
better than shutters to prevent inquisitive neighbours from seeing 
into the room. 

“The room was furnished in the style of the period—the 
Empire—with a parquetry floor, no carpet, and a bed all bronze 
and cherry-wood, with a sphinx at each corner, and lion’s paws 
for the feet. There was also on each drawer of the writing-table 
a lion’s head with a ring in its mouth, by which ring you pulled 
the drawer open. A square table, also in cherry-wood, but of a 
rather pinker shade than the rest of the furniture, and having 
a grey marble top and copper ornaments, stood opposite the bed 
against the wall, between the window and the door of a dressing- 
room; and opposite the fire-place was the large blue morocco sofa 
of which I have already spoken. High up in each corner stood a 
bracket of imitation lacquer, and upon one of them was a statuette 
of Niobe—rather an astonishing ornament to find in a bourgeois 
family. But wasn’t this incomprehensible Alberte even more 
astonishing? ‘The walls were painted a whitish yellow, and were 
devoid of pictures and engravings. I hung up my arms, sus- 


34 THE DIABOLIQUES 
pended on gilt copper hooks. When I hired this great calabash 


of an apartment—as Louis de Meung, who was not poetical, 
elegantly called it—I had placed in the centre a large round table, 
which I covered with military maps, books, and papers. It was 
my bureau, at which I wrote—whenever I did write. 

“Well, one evening, or rather one night, I had wheeled the sofa 
up to this large table, and I was drawing by the light of the lamp 
—not to distract my mind from the sole thought which had occu- 
pied it for a month, but rather the reverse, for it was the head of 
that perplexing Alberte which I was sketching—it was the face 
of that she-devil, who worried me as a devotee is worried by the 
other devil. 

“It was late. The street—through which passed two diligences 
every night, one each way (as now), one at a quarter to one in 
the morning, and the other at half past two, and both of which 
stopped to change horses at the Hotel de la Poste—the street was 
as silent as the grave. I could have heard a fly, and if by chance 
there was one in my room, it must have been asleep in a corner of 
the window-pane, or in one of the pleats of the curtain, which was 
of heavy stuff, and hung stiff and motionless before the window. 
The only noise was that which I myself made with my pencil and 
stump. 

“Yes, it was her face I was drawing; God knows with what 
care and attention! Suddenly, without any sound from the lock 
to forewarn me, my door opened a little way, giving that squeaky 
sound which doors make when the hinges are dry, and remained 
ajar, as though it were frightened by the sound it had made. I 
raised my eyes, thinking that I could not have closed the door 
properly that it should have opened in this unexpected way with 
a plaintive squeak that might frighten all those who were awake, 
and wake those who were asleep. I rose from the table in order 
to close it, but the half-opened door opened still wider, and still 
very gently, but with a repetition of that shrill sound which 
echoed like a groan through the silent house, and I saw, when it 
had opened to its full extent—Alberte! 


THE CRIMSON CURTAIN 35 


“Alberte, who in spite of all her precautions, and the deadly 
fear in which she was, could not prevent that cursed door from 
crying out. 

“Ah, tonnerre de Dieu! they may talk about visions—but not 
the most supernatural vision would have surprised me, or made 
my heart bound as it did when I saw coming towards me Alberte, 
frightened at the noise the door had made in opening, and which 
it would repeat when she closed it. Remember that I was but 
eighteen! Perhaps she saw my terror, and her own, and repressed 
by a quick sign the cry of surprise which might have escaped me— 
and certainly would have escaped but for this gesture—then she 
closed the door; not slowly but rapidly, to prevent the hinges from 
squeaking. It did not prevent them, and they gave one short 
shrill cry. The door being closed, she listened with her ear 
against it, if another sound more terrible might not reply to that 
of the door. . . . I thought I saw her totter. I sprang towards 
her, and she was soon in my arms.” 

“She seems to be getting along very nicely, your Miss Alberte,” 
I said to the Captain. 

“You think, perhaps,” he continued, as though he had not 
heard my jesting remark, “that when she fell into my arms she 
had lost her head through fright, or love—like a girl who 1s pur- 
sued, or may be pursued; who does not know what she is doing 
when she does the most stupid things, but abandons herself to 
that devil which is in every woman (they say) and which would 
always be her master, were it not that she has two others also in 
her—Cowardice and Shame—to interfere with the first one. Well, 
no, it was not like that! If you think so, you are wrong. She 
had no vulgar and shamefaced fears. It was rather she who took 
me to her arms than I who took her to mine... . Her first 
movement had been to throw her head on my breast, but she 
raised it again, and looked at me with her great eyes—those won- 
derful eyes—as if to see if it were really I she held in her arms. 

“She was horribly pale—more pale than I had ever seen her— 
but she had not lost that look of a princess. Her features were 


36 THE DIABOLIQUES 


still as hard and unimpressionable as a medal. Only on the 
slightly pouting lips there hovered an expression of I know not 
what, unless it was passion satisfied, or soon to be satisfied! Yet 
there was something so sad about this, that, in order not to see it, 
I impressed on her beautiful pink and pouting lips the kiss of 
triumphant desire! The mouth was half open, but the dark eyes, 
whose long lashes almost touched mine, did not close—or even 
wink—but behind them, as upon her mouth, I saw the same 
expression of madness. 

“As she clung to me in a burning kiss, I carried her to the blue 
morocco sofa—which had been St. Laurence’s grill to me during 
the month that I had rolled upon it thinking of her—and it 
creaked voluptuously under her bare back, for she was half naked. 
She had come from her bed and—would you believe it?—had been 
obliged to pass through the chamber where her father and mother 
slept! She had crept groping, with her hands in front of her, in 
order not to knock against some piece of furniture, and so make a 
noise which would wake them up.” 

“Ah!” T said, “one is not braver than that in the trenches. She 
was worthy to be a soldier’s mistress.” 

“And that she was, the first night,” replied the Vicomte. 

“She was as violent as I was, and I can swear that I was bad 
enough. But, in spite of that, there was a drawback. Neither 
she nor I could forget, in our most delicious transports, the 
dreadful situation in which we both were. In the midst of the 
happiness which she came to offer me, she was as though stupe- 
fied by the act which she had accomplished with such a firm will 
and such stubborn obstinacy. I was not astonished at it. I, for 
my part, was also stupefied. I had—though I did not tell her, 
or show it—a most terrible anxiety in my heart, whilst she pressed 
me closely to her own. I listened through her sighs and kisses, 
and through the terrifying silence which lay on that sleeping and 
trusting household, for something terrible—for the mother who 
did not awake, for the father who did not get out of bed! And I 
looked over her shoulder to see if the door—of which she had not 


THE CRIMSON CURTAIN 37 


taken out the key for fear of the noise it might make—would not 
open again, and show me the Medusa heads, pale and indignant, of 
the two old people whom we were deceiving so boldly and so 
shamefully—spectres of violated hospitality and justice. 

“Even the creaking of the blue sofa, though it sounded the 
reveille of Love, made me tremble dreadfully. My heart beat 
against hers, which seemed to re-echo the beatings. It was simul- 
taneously intoxicating and sobering; but it was terrible. After- 
wards I did not so much mind. By dint of repeating this in- 
credible imprudence, it ceased to disturb me. I grew accustomed 
to the danger of being surprised. I did not think of it. I 
thought only of being happy. At this first critical meeting she 
decided that she would come to me every other night—since I 
could not go to her, her room having only one door which led to 
the room of her parents—and she came every second night, but she 
never got rid of the sensation—the stupor—of the first night! 
Time did not produce on her the effect that it did on me. She was 
never inured to the risk she ran each time. She always lay on my 
breast, hardly speaking—for, as you may suppose, she was not 
a great talker—and when later on I grew calmer, seeing the dan- 
ger always avoided, and spoke to her, as a man speaks to his 
mistress, of what had already passed between us—of that strange 
insane coldness which had followed her bold step; when I asked 
her all those endless questions put by a lover, and which are, after 
all, nothing but curiosity, her only reply was a long embrace. Her 
sad mouth was dumb—in all but kisses. 

“There are women who tell you: ‘I have ruined myself for 
you’; and there are others who say: ‘How you must despise me!’ 
They are different ways of expressing the fatality of love—but she, 
no! She said nothing! A strange thing! A still stranger per- 
sonality! She gave me the idea of a thick, hard marble slab 
which had a fire burning beneath it. I believed there would come 
a moment when the marble would be cracked by the heat, but 
the marble continued to be as solid as ever. Night after night 
saw no change in her, and, if I may be permitted an ecclesiastical 


38 THE DIABOLIQUES 


expression, she was always as ‘difficult to confess’ as she had been 
the first night. I could get nothing out of her. At the most a 
syllable wrung from those beautiful lips, which I doted on the 
more because I had seen them cold and indifferent during the day, 
and this syllable did not give me much insight into the character 
of a girl who appeared to be more of a sphinx than all the others 
which adorned the Empire furniture.” 

“But, Captain,” I interrupted, “there must, however, have been 
an end to all this. You are a sensible man, and the sphinxes are 
fabulous animals. Devil take it! you must at last have found out 
what idea had got into the girl’s mind.” 

“An end! Yes, there was an end,” said Vicomte de Brassard, 
suddenly lowering the coach-window, as though the breath had 
failed in his broad chest, and he needed air before he could finish 
what he had to say. “But the idea, as you call it, of this singular 
girl was not discovered, after all. Our love, our relations, our 
intrigue—call it what you will—gave us, or rather gave me, sensa- 
tions which I do not think I have ever experienced since with 
women I loved more than Alberte, who, perhaps, did not love me, 
and whom, perhaps, I did not love! I never fully understood what 
I was to her, and what she was to me—and this lasted more than 
six months. During these six months, all that I understood was 
a kind of happiness of which you have not an idea when you are 
young. I understood the happiness of those who have something 
to hide. I understood the enjoyment of complicity in mystery, 
which, even without the hope of success, is the delight of conspira- 
tors. Alberte, at her parents’ table and elsewhere, was still 
always the ‘Infanta’ who had made such an impression on me the 
first time I saw her. Her Nero face, beneath the hard curls of the 
blue-black hair which touched her eyebrows, told nothing of the 
guilty nights, showed no blush. 

“I tried to be as impenetrable as she was, but I am sure I must 
have betrayed myself ten times if I had been well observed. I 
flattered myself proudly, and almost sensually, at the bottom of 
my heart, that all this superb indifference was for me, and that 


THE CRIMSON CURTAIN 39 


she felt for me all the baseness of passion—if passion can ever be 
base. No one but ourselves knew that; the thought was delicious. 
No one—not even my friend, Louis de Meung, with whom I had 
been discreet since I had become happy! He had guessed all, no 
doubt, but then he was as discreet as I was. He did not question 
me. I had, without any effort, resumed my friendly habits with 
him, the walks on the Promenade, in full uniform or undress, 
cards, fencing, and punch! Pardieu! when you know that happi- 
ness will come in the shape of a pretty girl, whose senses are 
aflame, and visit you regularly every other night at the same hour, 
that simplifies your existence wonderfully !” 

“But the parents of Alberte must have slept like the Seven 
Sleepers!” I said jokingly, cutting short the reflection of the old 
dandy by a jest, in order not to appear too much interested in his 
story, though it did interest me; for with dandies a joke is the 
only way of making yourself respected. 

“You imagine, then, I am romancing, and exaggerating the 
effects?” said the Viscomte. “But I am not a novelist. Some- 
times Alberte did not come. The door—the hinges of which 
were oiled now and went as soft as wool—sometimes did not open 
all night—because her mother had heard her, and cried out, or 
her father had seen her creeping on tiptoe across the room. But 
Alberte, having a head like iron, had always a pretext ready. 
She was ill. She was seeking the sugar-basin, and without a light, 
in oiter not to awake anyone.” 

“Those heads of iron are not so rare as you seem to think, 
Captain,” I interrupted again. “Your Alberte, after all, was no 
cleverer than the girl who received every night, in her grand- 
mother’s room—whilst the old lady was asleep behind the cur- 
tains—a lover, who came in through the window, and, as they had 
no blue sofa, they calmly lay down on the carpet. You know the 
story as well as I do. One night, a sigh louder than usual woke 
the grandmother, who cried from behind the curtains: ‘What is 
the matter, little one?’ and the girl nearly fainted on her lover’s 
breast, but nevertheless recovered herself, and replied: “The 


40 THE DIABOLIQUES 


busk of my stays hurt me whilst I was looking for a needle which 
has fallen on the floor, and which I cannot find,’ ” 

“Yes, I know the story,” replied the Vicomte. “The young girl 
of whom you speak was, if I remember rightly, one of the Guises. 
She acted up to her name, but you do not mention that after that 
night she never opened her window again to her lover, who was, 
I think, M. de Noirmoutier; whereas Alberte came to me the day 
after one of these terrible shocks, and exposed herself again to 
danger just as though nothing had occurred. I was then only 
an ensign, and not very strong in mathematics, with which I did 
not trouble myself; but it must have been evident to one who 
could calculate chances that some day—or night—there would be 
a dénouement.” 

“Ah, yes,’ I remarked, remembering what he had said before 
he began his story, “the dénouement which made you acquainted 
with the sensation of fear, Captain.” 

“Precisely,” he replied, in a voice so grave that it contrasted 
strongly with the flippant tone I had assumed. “You have seen, 
have you not? that from the time she seized my hand under the 
table, to the moment when she appeared like a ghost framed in 
my open doorway, Alberte had made me suffer all kinds of emo- 
tion. She had caused to pass through me more than one kind 
of shudder, more than one kind of terror; but they had been 
merely like the bullets which whistle round you—like the cannon- 
balls of which you feel only the wind: you shudder, but you go 
on. Well! it was not that. It was fear—thorough and complete 
fear, and no longer for Alberte, but for myself; for myself alone. 
What I felt was that sensation which makes the heart as pale 
as the face—that panic fear which makes whole regiments take to 
flight. I have seen the whole Chamboran regiment take to its 
heels, carrying with it its colonel and all the officers. But at that 
time I had seen nothing of the kind, and I learned—that which 
I believed to be impossible. 

“Listen! It was one night. In the life we were leading, it 
was bound to be at night—a long winter’s night. I will not say 


THE CRIMSON CURTAIN 41 


it was one of our calmest nights. Our nights were all calm. We 
were so happy that they became so. We slept over a powder- 
magazine. We were not disturbed at the thought of making 
love on a sword-blade over an abyss, like the bridge which leads 
to the Turkish hell. Alberte had come earlier than usual, in 
order to stay longer. When she thus came, my first caress, my 
first attention, was for her feet—those pretty feet, not now en- 
cased in green or blue slippers, but bare in order to make no 
sound—for they were icy from the cold bricks over which she 
walked the length of the corridor which led from her parents’ 
room to mine, which was at the other side of the house. 

“I warmed those icy feet, which for my sake had come out of a 
warm bed, fearing that she might catch some terrible disease of 
the lungs. I knew how to warm them, and bring back the pink 
or red tint to those pale, cold feet; but that night my method 
failed. My mouth was powerless to bring back the flush of blood. 

“Alberte was that night more silently loving than ever. 

“Her embraces had that languor and that force which were to 
me like a language, and a language so expressive that, if I had 
told her all my mad intoxication of joy, I should have needed no 
other answer. I understood those embraces. 

“But suddenly I felt them no longer. Her arms ceased to press 
me to her heart. I thought it was one of those swoons such as 
she often had, though generally in these swoons her embrace 
never relaxed.—I need not be prudish to you. We are both men, 
and we can speak as men. 

“I had had some experience of the voluptuous spasms of 
Alberte, and when they seized her, they did not interrupt my 
embraces. 

“TI remained as I was, on her breast, waiting till she should re- 
turn to consciousness, and proud in the certainty she would 
recover her senses under my embraces, and that the blow which 
had struck her, by striking again, would revive her. 

“But this was the exception to the rule. I gazed at her as she 
lay close to me on the blue sofa, awaiting the moment when her 


42 THE DIABOLIQUES 


eyes, now hidden under the long lids, should again reveal to me 
those splendid orbs of black velvet and flame; when those teeth 
which clenched almost tight enough to break the enamel at the 
least kiss on her neck or shoulders, should reopen and allow her 
breath to pass. But the eyes did not reopen, and the teeth did 
not unclench. 

“The icy chill rose from her feet, and mounted even to her lips. 
When I felt that horrible cold, I sat up, in order to look at her the 
better; with a bound I tore myself from her arms, one of which 
fell back on her body, and the other dropped to the ground by 
the side of the sofa on which she lay. Frightened, but having 
still my senses about me, I put my hand on her heart... . No 
sign of life! No sign in the pulse, in the temples, no sign in the 
carotid arteries, no sign anywhere.—Death with its terrible rigidity 
was everywhere! 

“I was sure of her death—and yet I could not believe it. 

“The human brain sometimes makes those stupid resolutions 
even in the face of clear evidence and destiny. Alberte was dead. 
Of what? I did not know; I was not a doctor. But she was dead, 
and though I saw as clearly as the sun at noonday that all I 
could do would be useless, yet I did everything that I knew would 
be absurdly useless. In my absolute ignorance of all knowl- 
edge, and want of all instruments and resources, I emptied over 
her face all the bottles on my dressing-table. I beat her hand, 
in spite of the noise it made in a house where the least sound 
made us tremble. I had heard one of my uncles, a captain in 
the 4th Dragoons, say that he had once saved one of his friends 
from apoplexy by bleeding him with a fleam, such as is used for 
bleeding horses. I had plenty of weapons in my room. I picked 
up a dagger, and cut Alberte’s arm deeply, but no blood flowed. 

“At the most a few drops coagulated. Neither kisses nor bites 
could galvanize into life that stiff corpse—which had become a 
corpse beneath my lips. Not knowing what more to do, I ended 
by extending myself on her body—the means employed (accord- 
ing to the old legends) by all the miracle-workers of the past 


THE CRIMSON CURTAIN 43 


when they resuscitated dead bodies—not hoping to restore her to 
life, but acting as though I did so hope. And it was whilst I was 
lying on this cold body that a thought, which had not before been 
able to form itself in the mental chaos in which the frightfully 
sudden death of Alberte had thrown me, appeared clearly, and I 
was afraid. 

“Yes, I was seized by a dread—a terrible dread. Alberte had 
died in my room, and her death would reveal everything. What 
would become of me? What should I do? 

“At the thought, I seemed to feel a terrible physical dread, and 
my hair stood on end. My backbone turned to ice, and I tried 
to struggle—but in vain—against the unmanly feeling. I told 
myself I must be calm; that I was a man—a soldier. I took my 
head in my hands, and whilst my brain reeled, I compelled my- 
self to think of the terrible situation in which I was, and consider 
all the ideas which whipped my brain as though it were a top— 
and all these ideas centred in the inanimate body of Alberte, and 
how her mother would find her in the morning in ‘the officer’s 
room’—dead and dishonoured! 

“The thought of the mother whose daughter I had dishonoured 
and perhaps killed, weighed more on my mind than even the 
corpse of Alberte. The death could not be concealed—but was 
there no means of concealing the dishonour proved by the dis- 
covery of the body in my room? That was the question I asked 
myself; the point on which I fixed all my attention. 

“The difficulty increased the more I studied it, until it assumed 
the proportions of an absolute impossibility. Frightful hallucina- 
tion! Sometimes the corpse ot Alberte seemed to fill the whole 
room. Ah, if her bedroom had not been placed behind that of 
her parents, I would have carried her back, at all risks, to her own 
bed. 

“But how could I, with a dead body in my arms, pass through 
a room with which I was unacquainted, and which I had never 
entered, and where the father and mother of the unfortunate girl 


slumbered in the light sleep of old people? 


44 THE DIABOLIQUES 


“Yet such was my state of mind, and my fear of the morrow 
and of the dead body found in my room galloped so madly through 
my brain, that this bold madness of carrying Alberte to her own 
room possessed me as the only means of saving the honour of the 
poor girl, and sparing me the shame of the reproaches of the 
father and mother. Would you believe it?—I can hardly be- 
lieve it myself when I think of it!—I had the strength to take 
Alberte’s dead body, raising it by the arms, and place it on my 
shoulders. Horrible burden! heavier by far than that of the 
damned in Dante’s hell. You must have carried, as I did, that 
fardel of flesh which but an hour before had made my blood boil 
with desire, and which now terrified me! You must have carried 
it yourself ere you can know what I felt and suffered. 

“Thus laden, I opened the door, and, like her, with bare feet 
that I might make no noise, I entered the corridor which led to her 
parents’ room, the door of which was at the end of the passage, 
and, stopping at each step, whilst my legs almost gave way under 
me, I listened for the least sound, and could hear nothing but the 
beating of my own heart. The moments seemed terribly long. 
Nothing moved. One step succeeded another. But when I 
arrived in front of that fatal door which I must enter, and which 
she had not quite closed, that she might find it still open on her 
return—and when I heard the long, quiet breathing of those two 
poor old people who were sleeping in such peace and confidence, 
I dared go no farther. I dared not pass that doorway, looking so 
black and threatening in the darkness. 

“I drew back; I almost fled with my burden. I returned to 
my room more and more terror-struck. I replaced the body of 
Alberte on the sofa, and, on my knees beside her, I repeated 
those supplicating questions. What is to be done? What will 
be the end? So perturbed was I, that the senseless and atrocious 
idea occurred to me to throw the body of this beautiful girl, who 
had been my mistress six months, out of the window. Despise 
me if you will! I opened the window—I drew aside the curtain 


THE CRIMSON CURTAIN 45 


you see there, and I looked into the black hole at the bottom of 
which was the street, for it was very dark that night. I could 
not see the pavement. “They will believe it is a suicide,’ I said 
to myself—and I once more raised Alberte’s body. But then a 
ray of common sense shot across my madness. ‘How was she 
killed? From whence could she have fallen if she is found under 
my window?’ 

“I fully realized the impossibility of what I had been about to 
do. I closed the window, the fastening of which creaked dismally. 
I drew the curtain again, feeling more dead than alive at each 
sound I made. Besides, either through the window—on the 
staircase—in the corridor—wherever I might leave or throw the 
body, it would be an eternal accuser—the profanation would be 
useless. An examination of the corpse would reveal everything, 
and a mother’s eyes would see all that the doctor or the judge 
tried to conceal from her. 

“What I suffered was insupportable, and I had a good mind 
to finish it all with a pistol-shot and in the ‘demoralized’ (an 
expression of the Emperor’s that I learned to understand later) 
condition in which I was, I looked at the weapons shining on the 
walls. But there! I will be frank. I was seventeen, and I 
loved—my sword. Both by inclination and race, I was a soldier. 
I had never been under fire, and I wished to be. I had military 
ambitions. In the regiment we joked about Werther—regarded 
as a hero at that time—but whom we officers pitied. The thought 
which prevented me from getting rid, by killing myself, of the 
ignoble fear which oppressed me, led to another which appeared 
to be salvation in the strait in which I was. 

“If I went and saw the Colonel! I said to myself. The Colonel 
is the father of the regiment—and I dressed myself as though 
the call to arms were beating for a surprise attack. I took my 
pistols as a precaution. Who knew what might happen? I em- 
braced for the last time, with all the affection of seventeen—one 
is always sentimental at seventeen—the dumb mouth of the poor 


46 THE DIABOLIQUES 


dead Alberte, which during the last six months had showered upon 
me such delights. I descended the stair on tiptoe. Breath- 
less as one who is fleeing for his life, I took an hour (it seemed 
to me an hour) to unbolt the street-door and turn the big key 
in the enormous lock; and, after having closed the door again 
with all the precautions of a thief, I ran like one fleeing for his life 
to the Colonel’s house. 

“I rang as though the house had been on fire. I shouted as 
though the enemy had been about to capture the flag of the regi- 
ment. I knocked everything over, including the orderly who 
tried to prevent me from entering his master’s room, and when 
once the Colonel was awake, I told him everything. I made a 
complete confession rapidly and boldly, for time pressed, and 1 
begged of him to save me. 

“The Colonel was a man of action. He saw at a glance in 
what a horrible gulf I was struggling. He had pity on the 
youngest of his children, as he called us, and indeed I was in a 
condition to be pitied. He told me—accentuating the statement 
with a round oath—that I must begin by clearing out of the town, 
immediately, and that he would undertake the rest; that he would 
see the parents as soon as I had gone, but that I must go at once, 
and take the diligence which would stop in ten minutes’ time at 
the Hotel de la Poste, and go to a town which he named, where 
he would write. He gave me some money, for I had omitted to 
put any in my pocket, pressed his old grey moustache to my 
cheeks, and ten minutes after this interview I had climbed on 
the roof—it was the only place left—of the diligence which was 
making the same journey as we are now, and I passed at a gallop 
under the window (you may guess how I looked at it) of the 
funeral chamber where I had left Alberte dead, and which was 
lighted up as it is to-night.” 

Vicomte de Brassard stopped, his voice quite broken. 

I no longer felt inclined to joke. The silence did not last long. 

“And after?” I said. 


THE CRIMSON CURTAIN 47 


“Well,” he replied, “there was no after. For a long time I 
was tortured by curiosity. I followed faithfully the Colonel’s 
instructions. I impatiently awaited a letter that would inform 
me of what had happened after my departure. I waited about 
a month; but at the end of the month it was not a letter from the 
Colonel I received, for he scarcely ever wrote, except with a sabre 
on the bodies of his enemies, but an order to join in twenty-four 
hours the 33rd Regiment, to which I had been appointed. A 
campaign, and that my first, distracted my thoughts. The battles 
in which I took part, the hardships, and also some adventures with 
women, caused me to neglect to write to the Colonel, and turned 
my thoughts from the sad memory of Alberte, without, however, 
effacing it. I preserved it still, like a bullet that cannot be ex- 
tracted. I said to myself that I should some day meet the 
Colonel, who would inform me of that which I wished to know, 
but the Colonel was killed at the head of his regiment at Leipsic. 
Louis de Meung also had been killed about a month before. 

“It is shameful, no doubt,” added the Captain, “but memories 
end by dying. The devouring curiosity to know what had hap- 
pened after my departure no longer disturbed me. I might have 
come back in after years to this little town—and, changed as I 
was, I should never have been recognized—and learned what had 
been the end of my tragic adventure. But something, which was 
certainly not respect for public opinion, which I have all my life 
despised, but rather a disinclination to face a second time that 
which had given me such a deadly fear, always restrained me.” 

This dandy, who had related without any dandyism such a grim 
and true story, was silent. I was thinking over his story, and 
I understood that this fine flower of dandyism had other sides 
to his character than those which appeared to his acquaintances. 
I remembered that he had said at the beginning that there was 
a black blot which had all his life destroyed his pleasures as a 
libertine—when suddenly he astonished me still more by seizing 
my arm roughly. 


48 THE DIABOLIQUES 


“Look!” he said. “Look at the curtain!” 

The slim shadow of a woman was plainly delineated on the 
curtain. 

“The ghost of Alberte!” said the Captain. “Fortune is mock- 
ing us to-night,” he added bitterly. 

The shadow passed, and the red bright square was again empty. 
But the wheelwright, who, whilst the Captain was speaking, had 
been busy with his screw, had finished his task. The fresh horses 
were ready, and were pawing the ground, striking out sparks with 
their iron shoes. 

The driver, his astrakhan cap over his ears, and the way-bill 
between his teeth, took the reins and climbed to the box, and, 
when once he was in his seat, cried in a loud clear voice: 

“Go on!” 

And we went on, and had soon passed the mysterious window 
with its red curtain—but I still continue to see it in my dreams. 


THE GREATEST LOVE OF DON JUAN 


en 








PT OM OP eo 
AY NON 
NAME 
NAS St ARE 
UT on ya ; 
N SEA HN, 








THE GREATEST LOVE OF DON JUAN 


“The Devil’s primest fare is innocence.” 


I 


“HE is still alive then, that hoary old reprobate?” 

“Still alive! I should rather think he was,—by God’s grace,” 
I took care to add, remembering Madame’s piety, “and of the 
most distinguished and aristocratic parish of Sainte-Clotilde—‘Le 
rot est mort! vive le roi! is what they used to say under the old 
Monarchy, in the days when that fine old piece of Sévres porcelain 
was yet unbroken. But Don Juan, in spite of all your democ- 
racies, is a monarch they will never break.” 

“Yes! yes! no doubt the Devil is in the immortal!” she returned 
in a self-approving tone. 

“As a matter of fact, he... 

Who 4). the Devil! ..)....” 

“No! no! Don Juan. He supped, I say, only three days ago 
in pleasant company. . . . Guess where... . 

“At your horrid Nate d'Orrof course. Lu 

“My dear Madame! Don Juan never goes there now... 
they’ve no fish fit to fry for his Highness’ palate. The Sefior 
Don Juan has always been a bit like Arnold of Brescia’s famous 
monk who, the Chronicles tell us, lived only on the blood of souls. 
That is what he loves to colour his champagne with, and it’s many 
a long day since it was to be had at that rendezvous of the com- 
monplace cocotte!” 

“You'll be telling me next,” she interrupted, in the ironic vein, 
“he supped at the Benedictine nunnery with the holy ladies . . .” 

“Yes! ladies of the Perpetual Adoration; why, certainly, 

51 


2 


22 


LIBRARY ‘ En 
UNIVERSITY OF | nut yore 


52 THE DIABOLIQUES 


Madam. For indeed I do think the adoration he has once in- 
spired, our redoubtable Lovelace, seems to last for good and all.” 

“And I think that for a good Catholic you are a trifle profane, 
sir!”’—this she said slowly, but not without a touch of irritation— 
“and I must beg you to spare me the details of your naughty 
suppers. I suppose this is a new way of telling me about your 
disreputable lady friends, this harping on Don Juan and his 
doings to-night.” 

“I merely state the facts, Madam. The disreputable persons 
present at the supper in question, if they are disreputable, are 
not my friends at all . . . unfortunately . . .” 

“Enough! enough!” 

“Forgive my modest disclaimer. . . . They were. . 

“The mille é trè? . . .” she interrupted again, thinking better 
of it and all but recovering her good temper under the stress of 
curiosity. 

“Oh! not all of them. . . . À round dozen merely. With as 
many as that, nothing could be more respectable, you know.” 

“Or more disreputable,” she put in tartly. 

“Besides, you know as well as I do the Comtesse de Chiffrevas’ 
boudoir will not hold a crowd. Everything was done that could be 
done; but, after all, it’s only a small room, her boudoir.” 

“What!”—raising her voice in her astonishment. “They had 
supper in the boudoir?” 

“Yes! in the boudoir. And why not? A battle-field makes a 
famous place to dine. They wished to give a very special and 
particular supper to Señor Don Juan, and it seemed better worthy 
of his exploits to give it on the scene of his former triumphs, where 
fond memories bloom instead of orange-blossoms. A pretty no- 
tion, at once tender and sad! ’Twas no victims’ ball! it was a 
victims’ supper-party!” 

“And Don Juan?” she asked in the tone of Orgon, in the play, 
saying: “And Tartufe?” 

“Don Juan took it in excellent part, and made an excellent 


supper, 


22 
e 


THE GREATEST LOVE 53 


‘,.. He, he alone before them all, 


as the poet sings—in the person of someone you know very 
well indeed—none other than the Comte Jules-Amédée-Hector de 
Ravila de Ravilès.” 

“Comte de Ravilés! Why, yes! He was a Don Juan. . .. 

So saying, the pious lady, case-hardened in her narrow bigotry 
as she was, and long past the age of day-dreams, lapsed then 
and there into a fond reverie of which Comte Jules-Amédée was 
the theme—that man of the old Don Juan breed, to which God 
has not indeed given “all the world and the glory thereof,’ but 
has suffered the Devil to do it for Him. 


9) 


II 


What I had just told the aged Marquise Guy de Ruy was the 
unvarnished truth. Hardly three days had elapsed since a dozen 
ladies of the virtuous Faubourg Saint-Germain (rest them easy, 
I will never damage their noble names!), who every one, the whole 
dozen, if we are to believe the cackling dowagers of the quarter, 
had been “on the best of good terms” (a really charming, old- 
fashioned locution) with the Comte Ravila de Ravilés, had con- 
ceived the singular idea of offering him a supper—he being the 
only male guest—in pious memory of . . . well! they did not say 
of what. A bold thing to do, but women, while timid individually, 
are as bold as brass when banded together. Probably not one of 
the whole party would have ventured to invite the Comte to a 
tête-à-tête supper at her own house; but all together, each back- 
ing up the other, they feared not to weave a chain, like mesmerists 
round their mystic tub, round this magnetic and most compromis- 
ing individual, the Comte de Ravila de Ravilés.... 

“What a name!” 

“A providential name, Madam.” 

The Comte de Ravila de Ravilés, who, by the by, had always 
lived up to his high-sounding and picturesque title, was the 


54 THE DIABOLIQUES 


perfect incarnation of all the long line of Lovelaces Romance and 
History tell of, and even the old Marquise Guy de Ruy—a dis- 
contented old lady, with light-blue eyes, cold and keen, but not 
so cold as her heart or so keen as her tongue—allowed that in 
these times, when women and women’s concerns grow day by 
day less important, if there was anyone who could recall Don 
Juan, it must surely be he! Unfortunately, it was Don Juan in 
the Fifth Act. The witty Prince de Ligne said he could not make 
himself believe Alcibiades ever grew to be fifty; and here again 
the Comte de Ravila was to be a true Alcibiades to the end of 
the chapter. Like d’Orsay, a dandy hewn out of the marble of 
Michael Angelo, who was the handsomest of men down to his 
last hour, Ravila had possessed the good looks specially belong- 
ing to the Don Juan breed—that mysterious race which does 
not proceed from father to son, like other races, but appears here 
and there, at recurring intervals, in the families of mankind. 

His beauty was beyond dispute—of the gay, arrogant, imperial 
sort, Juanesque in fact (the word is a picture and makes descrip- 
tion needless); and—had he made an unholy bargain with the 
~ Devil?—it was his still. . . . Only, God was beginning to exact 
His penalty; life’s cruel tiger-claws already seamed that “front 
divine,” crowned with the roses of so many kisses, and on his 
wide and wicked temples appeared the first white hairs that pro- 
claim the impending invasion of the barbarian hosts and the 
Fall of the Empire. . . . He wore them, it is true, with the calm 
insouciance of pride surfeited with power; but women who had 
loved him would sometimes gaze at them with sad eyes. Who 
knows? perhaps they read what hour of day it was for them- 
selves on that whitening brow? Alas and alas! for them as for 
him, ’twas the hour for the grim supper with the cold white- 
marble commendator, after which only Hell is left—first the Hell 
of old age, then the other! And this perhaps is why, before 
sharing with him this last, bitter meal, they planned to offer 
him this supper of their own, and made it the miracle of art 
it was. 


THE GREATEST LOVE 55 


Yes, a miracle of good taste and refinement, of patrician luxury, 
elegance, and pretty conceits; the most charming, the most deli- 
cious, the most toothsome, the most heady, and, above all, the 
most original of suppers. How original, just think for a moment! 
Commonly it is love of merriment, the thirst for amusement, that 
supply motives for a supper-party; but this one was dedicated 
only to fond memories and soft regrets, we might almost say to 
despair—but despair in full dress, despair hidden beneath smiles 
and laughter, despair that craved just one more merry night, one 
more escapade, one last hour of youth, one last intoxication—and 
so an end of it all for ever. 

The fair Amyphitryons of this incredible supper, so far removed 
from the timid habits of the society to which they belonged, must 
surely have experienced something of the feelings of Sardanapalus 
on his funeral-pyre when he heaped upon it, to perish with him, 
wives, slaves, horses, jewels, all the splendid trappings of his life. 
They too collected at this last supper of farewell all the splendours 
of their past. To it they brought all their stores of beauty, of 
wit and wisdom, of magnificence and power, to pour them forth 
once and for all in one supreme and final conflagration. 

The hero before whom they wrapped and robed themselves in 
this garment of consuming fire counted for more in their eyes than 
all Asia did for Sardanapalus. They flirted with him as never 
women flirted with any man before, or with any roomful of men; 
and their keen coquetry was yet further inflamed by jealousy, 
which is concealed in good society, but which they had no cause 
to dissemble here, for they all knew that he had been the lover 
of each and all of them, and shame shared among so many ceases 
to be shame at all. . . . The sole and only rivalry between them 
was, Which should carve his epitaph deepest in her heart? 

That night he enjoyed the rich, sovereign, nonchalant, ruminat- 
ing pleasure of a father confessor and a sultan. There he sat, 
monarch and master, in the centre of the table, facing the Com- 
tesse de Chiffrevas, in her boudoir with its peach-blossom hang- _ 
ings—or was it the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of evil?—~ 


56 THE DIABOLIQUES 


this has always been a moot point. The fiery gaze of his blue 
eye—heavenly blue many a poor creature has deemed to her cost, 
to find it later of quite another sort—was fixed on his fair com- 
panions. All twelve were beautiful, all were dressed to perfec- 
tion; and, seated round the festive board, which glistened with 
crystal lights and flowers, they displayed, from the scarlet of the 
open rose to the soft gold of the mellow grape, every nuance of 
ripe and opulent charms. 

Only the crude green of extreme youth was absent, the little 
girls Byron loathed, smelling of bread and butter, thin, weedy, 
undeveloped creatures. Fine, full-favoured summer, rich and 
generous autumn, these were the seasons represented—full curves 
and ample proportions, dazzling bosoms, beating in majestic swell 
above liberally cut corsages, and below the clear modelling of the 
naked shoulder, arms of every type of beauty, but mostly pow- 
erful arms, Sabine biceps that have struggled against the Roman 
ravisher, vigorous enough, you would think, to grasp the wheels 
of the car of life and twine around the spokes and stop its course 
by sheer force. 

I have spoken of happy ideas. One of the happiest at this 
supper was to have all the waiting done by maidservants, that 
nothing might disturb the harmony of a celebration where women 
were the only queens, and did all the honours. . . . Señor Don 
Juan then was able to bathe his burning gaze in a sea of living and 
dazzling flesh, such as Rubens delights to flaunt in his strong, 
fleshy pictures, but, besides, he could plunge his pride in the ether, 
more or less transparent, more or less turgid, of all these hearts. 
The fact is, at bottom, and despite all appearances to the con- 
trary, Don Juan is an ardent idealist! He is like the Devil, his 
master, who loves men’s souls better than their bodies, and ac- 
tually traffics in the former by choice, the hellish slave-driver! 

Witty, high-bred, and aristocratic, but for the nonce as reck- 
lessly gay as pages of the Household—when there was a King’s 
Household and pages of it—they exhibited a scintillating bril- 
liance, a dash, a verve, a brio, that were beyond compare. They 


THE GREATEST LOVE 57 


felt themselves in better form than they had ever been in their 
most palmy days; they felt a new and mysterious power in their 
inmost being which they had never suspected the existence of 
before. 

Joy at this discovery, a sensation of tripled intensity in the 
vital powers, still more the physical incitements, so stimulating 
to highly strung temperaments, the flashing lights, the penetrating 
odour of many flowers dying in an atmosphere overheated with the 
emanations of all these lovely bodies, the sting of heady wines, 
all acted together. Then the mere thought of this supper, which 
had just that piquancy of naughtiness the fair Neapolitan asked 
for in her lemonade to make it perfectly delicious, the intoxicating 
notion of complicity in this wild, wicked feast—not that it con- 
descended for an instant to any of the vulgar incidents of the 
Regent’s Suppers; it remained throughout true to the tone of the 
Faubourg Saint-Germain and the nineteenth century, and of all 
those lovely bosoms, with hearts beating beneath that had been 
under fire and still loved to tempt the fray, not one lost so much 
as a pin or a knot of ribbon—all these things together helped to 
tune the magic harp which all of them carried within themselves 
and to stretch the strings well-nigh to breaking-point, till they 
quivered again in passionate octaves and ineffable diapasons of 
emotion. . . . A curious page it will make of his Secret Memoirs 
this, if Ravila ever writes them! . . . As I told the Marquise Guy 
de Ruy, I was not at the supper myself, and if I am able to 
report some of its incidents and the narrative with which it con- 
cluded, I owe them to no other than Ravila himself, who, faith- 
ful to the traditional indiscretion characteristic of all the Don Juan 
breed, took the trouble one evening to tell me the whole story. 


III 


It was getting late—or, rather, early—and dawn was near. On 
the ceiling and at one spot in the pink silk curtains of the boudoir, 
otherwise hermetically closed, there grew and increased a splash 


58 THE DIABOLIQUES 


of opalescent light, like an ever-enlarging eye, the eye of day as 
if fain to look in through the crevice and see what was doing in 
the brilliantly lighted room. A certain languor was in the air, 
assailing these champions of the Round Table, these merry-makers 
who had been so animated but a moment ago. The crisis is famil- 
jar at every supper-party, the instant when, wearied with the 
gaiety and emotional stress of the night, everything seems to 
languish at once, drooping heads, burning cheeks, reddened or 
paled by excitement, tired eyes under heavy, darkened lids, even 
the candles themselves, which seem to quiver and grow larger in 
the many-branched candelabra, fiery flowers with stems of chiselled 
bronze and gold. 

The conversation, hitherto general and vivacious, a game of 
shuttlecock where each had put in her stroke, had grown frag- 
mentary and broken, and no distinct word was now audible amid 
the musical confusion of voices, which, with their aristocratic tones, 
mingled in a pretty babble, like birds at break of day on the 
confines of a wood, when one of them—a high-pitched voice, 
imperious, almost insolent, as a Duchess’s should be—cried sud- 
denly above all the rest to the Comte de Ravila what was evi- 
dently the conclusion of a previous whispered conversation be- 
tween the two, which none of the others, each engaged in talk 
with her immediate neighbour, had heard. 

“You are the reputed Don Juan of our day: well! you should 
tell us the history of the conquest of all others which most flattered 
your pride as a ladies’ man, and which you judge, in the light of 
the present moment, the greatest love of your life... .” 

And the question, no less than the voice in which it was uttered, 
instantly cut short all the scattered conversations that were buzz- 
ing round the table, and imposed a sudden silence. 

The voice was that of the Duchesse de * * * * *—I will not 
lift the veil of asterisks, but you will very likely know who it 
was when I tell you she is the fairest of all fair women, both 
complexion and hair, with the darkest eyes under long golden 
eyebrows in all the Faubourg Saint-Germain. She was seated, 


THE GREATEST LOVE 59 


like a saint at God’s right hand, at the right hand of the Comte 
de Ravila, the God of the feast, a God that, for the moment, 
waived his right to use his enemies as his footstool; slender and 
spiritual, like an arabesque and a fairy, in her dress of green 
velvet with glints of silver, the long train twining round her chair, 
no bad imitation of the serpent’s tail in which the alluring shape 
of the sea-nymph Melusina terminates. 

“A happy thought!” put in the Comtesse de Chiffrevas, second- 
ing as mistress of the house the wish expressed by the Duchess. 
“Yes! the love of all loves, inspired or felt, you would most gladly 
live again, were such a thing possible.” 

“Oh, I would be glad to live them all again!” cried Ravila with 
the unquenchable gusto of a Roman Emperor, the insatiable crav- 
ing your utterly blasé man of pleasure sometimes retains. And 
he flourished aloft his champagne-glass—not the silly, shallow 
cup fashionable in these pagan days, but the true champagne- 
glass, the glass our fathers drank from, tall and slender, and called 
by them a flute, mayhap from the celestial harmonies in which 
it often bathes our heart!—Then he embraced in one sweeping 
look the whole circle of fair women that wreathed the board so 
royally —“And still,” he went on, replacing his glass before him 
with a sigh that sounded strange from such a Nebuchadnezzar, 
whose only experience as yet of the grass of the field as an article 
of diet had been the tarragon salads at the Café Anglais,—“and 
still, how true it is there is always one among all the emotions of 
a lifetime that shines ever in the memory more brightly than the 
rest, as life advances—one for which we would gladly exchange 
them all.” 

“The brightest diamond of the casket,” murmured the Comtesse 
Chiffrevas in a dreamy tone, perhaps looking back at the spar- 
kling facets of her own career. 

“... The legends of my country,” broke in the Princess Jable 
—who is from the foot-hills of the Ural Mountains—“tell of a 
famous and fabulous diamond, rose-coloured at first, but which 
turns black presently, yet remains a true diamond all the time, 


60 THE DIABOLIQUES 


and sparkles only the more brilliantly for the change. . . .”—She 
said it with the strange exotic charm peculiar to her, this Gipsy 
Princess. For a true Gipsy she is, married for love by the hand- 
somest Prince of all the exiled Polish nobility; yet having as much 
the air of a high-born Princess as if she had first seen the light 
in the palace of the Jagellons. 

A regular explosion followed! “Yes! yes!” they clamoured 
with one voice. “Tell us, Comte!” they urged in tones already 
vibrating with a passionate supplication, curiosity quivering in 
the very curls that fringed the back of their necks. They drew 
together, shoulder to shoulder; some with cheek on hand and 
elbow on the board, some leaning back in their chairs, with open 
fans before their mouths, all challenging him with wide, inquisitive 
eyes. 
aff you are bent on hearing the story,” said the Comte with 
the nonchalance of a man well aware how much procrastination 
adds to the keenness of desire. 

“We are, we are!” cried the Duchesse, gazing, as a Turkish 
despot might at his sabre’s edge, at the gold dessert-knife she 
held in her fingers. 

“Well, listen then,” he said finally, still with the same fine air 
of indifference. 

They fell into attitudes of profound attention, and, fixing their 
gaze on his face, devoured him with their eyes. Every love-story 
is interesting to a woman; but here, perhaps—who knows?—the 
chief charm lay for each one of his audience in the thought that 
the tale he was about to unfold might be her own... . They 
knew him to be too much of a gentleman and too well-bred not 
to be sure he would suppress all names and, where necessary, slur 
over indiscreet details; and their conviction of this fact made them 
so much the more eager to hear the story. ‘They not only desired, 
but, what is more, they hoped—each for a special and particular 
sop to her own vanity. 

Yet this same vanity was on the qui vive to scent a rival in 
this reminiscence called up as the tenderest in a life that must 


THE GREATEST LOVE 61 


have been so full of them. The old sultan was going once more 
to throw the handkerchief . . . that no hand would stoop to pick 
up, but which the favoured one it should have fallen to would 
silently and gratefully receive into her heart. 

Knowing what his fair audience expected, you will now be able 
to realize the utterly unexpected thunderclap he called down on 
all those listening heads. 


IV 


“T have often heard moralists declare—men who have had deep 
experience of life,” began the Comte de Ravila, “that the strongest 
of all our loves is neither the first nor yet the last, as many think, 
but the second. But in these matters everything is uncertain, and 
at any rate it was not so with me. . . . What you ask me about, 
ladies, the story I am about to tell you to-night, dates from the 
best period of my youth. I was not then what is technically 
called a ‘young man,’ but I was young, albeit I had already, as 
an old uncle of mine, a Knight of Malta, used to say to describe 
this epoch of life, sown my wild oats.t I was in the full vigour 
of my prime, and I was in full relations (to use the pretty Italian 
phrase) with a woman you all know well and have all 
gomired.. . .” 

At this the look which each of the group simultaneously cast 
at all the rest, one and all eagerly drinking in the old serpent’s 
honeyed words, was a thing to have seen—for, indeed, it is 
indescribable. 

“The woman in question,” Ravila went on, “had every element 
of ‘distinction’ you can imagine, in every sense of the word. She 
was young, rich, of noble name, beautiful, witty and artistic— 
simple, too, and unaffected, with the genuine unaffectedness to 
be found only in well-bred circles, and not always there—to crown 

1“Pavais fini mes caravanes”; caravane was the word used by the 


Knights of Malta to designate their periodical filibustering cruises against 
the Turks. 


62 THE DIABOLIQUES 


all, without another thought or inspiration but to please me, to 
be my devoted slave, at once the fondest of mistresses and the 
best of comrades. 

“I was not, I have reason to believe, the first man she had 
loved. . . . She had given her affection once before—and it was 
not to her husband; but the whole affair had been virtuous, 
platonic, utopian—the sort of love that practises rather than satis- 
fies a woman’s heart, that trains its powers for another and fuller 
passion, which is bound to supervene ere long. It is prentice love 
in fact, something like the messe blanche young priests repeat by 
way of rehearsal, that they may not blunder in the genuine, 
solemn Mass that is to follow. . . . When I came into her life, 
she was only at the ‘white Mass’; I was her genuine Mass—and 
she went through it with every circumstance of pomp and cere- 
mony, like a very cardinal.” 

At this the prettiest smile flashed out on the twelve sweet 
mouths that listened round, like a circling eddy on the limpid sur- 
face of a pool. . . . It was gone in an instant, but entrancing while 
it lasted. 

“She was indeed one in a thousand!” the Comte resumed. 
“Rarely have I known more real good-heartedness, more gentle 
compassion, more justness of feeling—and this even in love, which 
is, you know, a passion made up of evil as well as good. . . . No- 
where have I seen less manceuvring, or less prudishness and 
vanity, two things so often entangled in the web of feminine 
character, like a skein clawed over by a mischievous cat... . 
The cat had no part in her composition. . . . She was what those. 
confounded romance-writers who poison our minds with phrases 
would call a ‘simple, primitive nature, complicated and em- 
bellished by civilization’; but she had borrowed of it only the 
pretty luxury of her habits, and not one of those little vices that 
sometimes seem even more alluring than the luxuries.” 

“Was she dark or fair?” suddenly interrupted the Duchesse, 
with a startling directness, tired out with so much meta- 
PHYSICS 200 


THE GREATEST LOVE 63 


“Ah! you miss my point!” exclaimed Ravila keenly. “Well, I 
will tell you; her hair was dark, black as the blackest jet, the most 
perfect ebony mirror I have ever seen flash back the light from a 
woman’s head, but her complexion was fair—and it is by com- 
plexion, not hair, you should pronounce a woman brunette or 
blonde,” added this student of the sex, who had observed women 
for something else than just to paint their portraits after- 
wards. . . . She was blonde with black hair. . . .” 

Each blond head around the table (alas, only blond-haired 
they!) betrayed an almost imperceptible movement of disappoint- 
ment. For them clearly the tale had henceforth lost something 
of its interest. 

“She had the ebony locks of Night,” resumed Ravila, “but 
crowning the face of Aurora, for indeed her face glowed with a 
rosy freshness of dawn, as dazzling as rare, that had triumphantly 
resisted years of Paris life with its hot rooms and artificial light, 
that burns up so many roses in the flames of its candelabra. Her 
roses seemed but to win a richer hue, so brilliant was the carmine 
that mantled on cheek and lip! Indeed, this twofold radiance 
accorded well with the ruby she always wore on her forehead 
(the frontlet was still in fashion in those days), which, in com- 
bination with her flashing eyes, whose very brilliancy made it 
impossible to distinguish their colour, formed a triangle, as it 
were, of three bright jewels in her face! Tall, but robust and 
even majestic in figure, cut out for the helpmate of a colonel of 
dragoons—her husband at that time was only a major in the 
Light Horse—she enjoyed, for all her fine-ladyhood, a peasant 
woman’s vigorous health, who drinks in the sun at every pore. 
And she had all the heat and ardour of the sun in her veins, and 
in her very soul as well—ever present, and ever ready. . . . But— 
and this was the strange part of it—this being, so strong and 
simple and unspoiled, as generous and as pure as the red blood 
that mantled in her cheeks and dyed her rosy arms, was—can 
you credit it?—maladroit and awkward in a lover’s arms. . . .” 

Here one or two fair auditors dropped their eyes, only to raise 


64. THE DIABOLIQUES 
them again directly with a look of demure mischief in their 
GEDIDS (iw ss 

“Yes! awkward in this respect as she was reckless in her regard 
for appearances,” continued Ravila, and vouchsafed no further 
information on this delicate point. “In fact, the man who loved 
her had to be incessantly teaching her two lessons, neither of which 
she ever really learnt—not to affront needlessly public opinion, 
a foe that is always under arms and always merciless, and to 
practise in the intimacy of private life those all-important acts of 
love that guard passion from dying of satiety. Love she had in 
abundance, but the art and mystery of its skilled exponents were 
beyond her ken. . . . She was the antipodes of most women, who 
possess the latter qualifications to perfection, but of the other not 
a whit. Now to comprehend and apply the cunning maxims of 
the Jl Principe, you must be a Borgia to begin with. Borgia 
comes first, Machiavelli second; one is the poet, the other the 
critic. No Borgia was she, but just a good woman in love, as 
simple-minded, with all her monumental beauty, as the little maid 
in the rustic picture who tries to take up a handful of spring 
water from the fountain to quench her thirst, but in her trembing 
haste lets it trickle away every drop between her fingers, and 
stands there an image of embarrassment and confusion... . 

“Yet in a way the contrast was piquant and almost delightful 
between this embarrassed awkwardness and the grand, passion- 
fraught personality of the woman, who would have deceived the 
most acute observer when seen in society—who knew love, and 
even love’s bliss, but had not the faculty to pay back half of what 
she received. Only, unfortunately, I was not artist enough to be 
content with this mere delight of contrast; hence now and again 
displays on her part of disquiet, jealousy, and even violence. But 
all this, jealousy, disquiet, violence, was swallowed up in the in- 
exhaustible kindness of her heart at the first sign of pain she 
thought she had inflicted—as awkward at wounding as she was 
at caressing! ‘Tigress of an unknown species, she fondly imag- 
ined she had claws, but lo! when she would show them, none 


THE GREATEST LOVE 65 


were to be found within the sheath of her beautiful velvet paws. 
Her very scratches were velvet-soft!” 

“What is the man driving at?” whispered the Comtesse de Chiff- 
revas to her neighbour. “This surely cannot be Don Juan’s 
proudest triumph!” 

All these complex natures could not understand such simplicity 
and remained incredulous. 

“Thus we lived,” Ravila went on, “on terms of friendship, now 
and then interrupted by storms, yet never shipwrecked, a friend- 
ship that, in the little village they call Paris, was a mystery to 
none. .. . The Marquise—she was a Marquise . . .” 

There were three at table, and raven-locked too. But they 
made no sign. They knew only too well it was not of them he 
spoke. . . . The only velvet about the trio was on the upper lip 
of one of the three—a lip bearing a voluptuous shadowing of 
down, and for the moment, I can assure you, a well-marked 
expression of disdain. 

“. . - And a Marquise three times over, just as Pashas may be 
Pashas of Three Tails,” continued Ravila, who was getting into 
the swing of his narrative. “The Marquise was one of those 
women who have no idea of hiding anything and who, if they had, 
could never do it. Her daughter even, a child of thirteen, for all 
her youth and innocence, saw only too clearly the nature of the 
feeling her mother had for me. I know not which of our poets 
has asked what the girls think of us, the girls whose mothers we 
have loved. A deep question I often put to myself when I caught 
the child’s inquisitive gaze fixed black and menacing upon me 
from the ambush of her great, dark eyes. . . . A shy, reserved 
creature, she would, more often than not, leave the drawing-room 
when I entered, and, if obliged to remain, would invariably station 
herself as far away from me as possible; she had an almost con- 
vulsive horror: of my person—which she strove to hide in her own 
bosom, but which was too strong for her and betrayed itself 
against her will by little almost imperceptible signs.—I noticed 
every one. The Marquise, though anything but an observant 


66 THE DIABOLIQUES 


woman, was for ever warning me: ‘You must take care, dearest. 
I think my girl is jealous of you. . . ? 

“But I was taking much better care all the while than she was. 

“Had the little girl been the Devil himself, I would have defied 
her to decipher my game. . . . But her mother’s was as clear as 
day. Everything was visible in the rosy mirror of her beautiful 
face, so often troubled by passing clouds! From the strange dis- 
like the child showed, I could not help thinking she had surprised 
her mother’s secret through some indiscreet burst of feeling, some 
involuntary look fraught with excess of tenderness. I may tell 
you she was a funny-looking child, quite unworthy of the glorious 
mould she had issued from, an ugly child, even by her mother’s 
admission, who only loved her the more for it. A little rough- 
cut topaz—how shall I describe it?—a half-finished sculptor’s 
study in bronze—but with eyes black as night and having a 
strange, uncanny magic of their own. Later on.. .” 

But here he stopped dead as if regretting his burst of confidence 
and fearful of having said too much. . . . Every face once more 
expressed an open, eager, vivid curiosity, and the Countess, with 
a knowing air of pleased expectancy, actually dropped from be- 
tween her lovely lips an expressive “At last!” 


af 


“In the earlier days of my liaison with her mother,” the Comte 
de Ravila resumed, “I had shown the child all the little fondling 
familiarities one has with children. . . . I used to bring her bags 
of sugared almonds; I used to call her my ‘little witch,’ and very 
often, when talking to her mother, I would amuse myself with 
fingering the curls that hung over her temple—thin, sickly-looking 
curls, like black tow—but the ‘little witch,’ whose big mouth had 
a pretty smile for everybody else, at once waxed pensive, her 
cheerfulness disappeared, and her brows would knit fiercely. Her 
little face grew tense and rigid, the wrinkled mask of an overbur- 
dened caryatid, and as my hand brushed her forehead, it looked 


THE GREATEST LOVE 67 


for all the world as though it bore the crushing weight of some 
vast entablature. 

“After a while, meeting invariably with the same sullenness 
and apparent hostility, I took to leaving this sensitive plant alone, 
which drew in its sad-coloured petals so violently at the least 
touch of a caress. . . . I even left off speaking to her! ‘She feels 
you are robbing her,’ the Marquise would say to me. ‘Her in- 
stinct tells her you are appropriating a portion of her mother’s 
love” Sometimes she would add outright: ‘The child is my con- 
science, and her jealousy my remorse.’ 

“Once the Marquise had tried to question her as to the pro- 
found disfavour in which she held me, but she had got nothing 
out of her but the broken, obstinate, stupid answers you have to 
drag out with a corkscrew of reiterated questions from a child 
that prefers not to speak. . . . ‘Nothing is the matter... I 
don’t know . . ? and so on, and soon. Finally, seeing how hard 
and obstinate the little image was, she had left off questioning her 
and turned away in sheer weariness. 

“I forgot, by the by, to tell you one thing. The queer child was 
profoundly religious, in a gloomy, medieval, Spanish, superstitious 
sort of way. She twined around her meagre little person all kinds 
of scapularies and stuck on her bosom, which was as flat as the 
back of your hand, and round her swarthy throat, a whole heap 
of crosses, Blessed Virgins and Holy Spirits. ‘You are a free- 
thinker, you know,’ the Marquise would say to me, ‘worse luck; 
perhaps you have shocked her feelings some time with your talk. 
Be very careful of anything you say before her; and do not add 
to my sins in the eyes of my child, towards whom I already feel 
myself so guilty!’ Then, later on, the girl’s behavior showing no 
change or improvement whatever, ‘You will end by hating the 
child,’ the Marquise would complain anxiously, ‘and I cannot 
blame you” But she was wrong in this; my feeling towards the 
sullen child was one of simple indifference, when I took the trouble 
to think of her at all. 

“I treated her with the ceremonious politeness usual between 


68 THE DIABOLIQUES 


grown-up people who do not like each other. I addressed her 
formally, as Mademoiselle, and she returned the compliment with 
a freezing Monsieur. . . . She would do nothing when I was there 
to attract admiration or even notice. . . . Her mother could never 
persuade her to show me one of her drawings or play a piece on 
the piano in my presence. If ever I came upon her seated at the 
instrument practising eagerly and industriously, she would stop 
dead, get up from the music-stool, and refuse utterly to go on. ... 

“Once only, when there was company and her mother desired 
her to play, she consented to take her place at the open key- 
board, with a look of being victimized that was anything but 
propitiating, I can tell you, and began some drawing-room piece 
with abominally difficult fingering. I was standing by the fire- 
place, and enfiladed her with my gaze. Her back was towards 
me, and there was no mirror in front of her in which she could see 
I was looking at her. . . . All of a sudden her back—she always 
held herself ill, and many a time her mother would tell her: ‘If 
you will hold yourself like that, you'll end by getting consumption’ 
—well, all of a sudden her back straightened as if my look had 
broken her spine like a bullet; and, slamming down the lid of the 
piano with a resounding crash, she rushed out of the room... . 
They went to look for her, but for that evening, at any rate, noth- 
ing would induce her to come back. 

“Well, vain as men are, it would seem their vanity is often blind, 
and, for all her strange behavior (and indeed I gave it very little 
attention), I had never a suspicion of the true feeling the mys- 
terious creature entertained for me. Nor yet had her mother; 
jealous as the latter was of every woman who entered her drawing- 
room, in this case her jealousy was as fast asleep as my own van- 
ity. The truth was eventually revealed in a sufficiently startling 
fashion. The Marquise, who could keep nothing from her inti- 
mates, told me the story, her face still pale with the fright she had 
had, though bursting with laughter at the notion of having been 
frightened at all. In doing so, she was ill-advised.” 

The word “ill-advised” the Count had marked with just that 


THE GREATEST LOVE 69 


touch of emphasis a clever actor knows how to throw into his 
voice when he has a point to make. This was the thread, he 
was perfectly aware of the fact, on which the whole interest of his 
story now hung! 

The mere hint was enough apparently, for all twelve faces 
flushed once more with an intensity of emotion comparable only to 
the cherubim’s countenances before the throne of the Almighty! 
Is not curiosity in a woman’s heart as intense an emotion as ever 
adoration among the angels of God? . . . For his part, he marked 
them all, those cherub faces (which were a good deal more than 
mere head and shoulders, though) and, finding them doubtless 
primed for what he had to say, quickly resumed and went on 
without further pause. 

“Yes, she could not help bursting with laughter, merely to 
think of it!—so the Marquise told me a while after, when she 
came to relate the story; but she had been in no laughing mood 
at first!—‘Only picture the scene,’ she began (I will endeavour to 
recall her exact words); ‘I was seated just where we are now.’ 

“This was one of those small double sofas known as a dos-d-dos, 
of all contrivances in the way of furniture surely the best-designed 
for a pair of lovers to quarrel and make it up again, without leav- 
ing their seats. 

““But you were not where you are now—thank goodness !— 
when, who do you think was announced?—you would never guess 
—who but the respected curé of Saint-Germain-des-Prés? Do 
you know him? . . . No, you never go to church, you bad man! 
. . . 90 how should you know the poor old curé, who is a saint, 
and who never sets foot inside the doors of any woman in his par- 
ish unless it is a question of raising money for his poor or his 
Church? For a moment I thought this was what he had come 
for now. 

““He had prepared my daughter at the proper time for her 
first communion; and as she went regularly to communion, sub- 
sequently, she had retained him as her confessor. For this reason, 
over and over again since then, I had invited the good priest to 


70 THE DIABOLIQUES 


dine with us, but always in vain. On entering the room, he dis- 
played the greatest agitation, and I read in his usually placid 
features manifest signs of an embarrassment so extreme and so 
uncontrollable, I could not set it down to the account of mere 
shyness. Involuntarily the first words that escaped me were: 
“Good heavens, Father! What is the matter?” 

“<«“The matter, dear Madam,” he began, “. . . the matter is, 
you see before you the most embarrassed man in Europe. For 
fifty years I have been a minister in God’s service, and all that 
time I have never had a more delicate mission to perform, or one 
that baffled me more completely to understand... .” 

“Then he sat down, asking me to have the door shut against all 
comers throughout our interview. As you may suppose, all these 
solemn preliminaries began rather to frighten me... . 

“Noticing this, he added: “Nay! do not be frightened, I beg 
of you; you will need all your calmness to attend to my story, 
and to account, to my satisfaction, for the unheard-of circum- 
stance we have to deal with, and which even now I cannot be- 
lieve authentic. . . . Your daughter, Madam, on whose behalf I 
am here, is—you know it as well as I do—an angel of purity and 
goodness. I know her very soul. I have held it between my 
two hands since she was a child of seven, and I am convinced 
she is deceiving herself—through sheer innocence of heart, it may 
be. . . . But this morning she came to me to avow in confession 
—you will not believe it, nor can I, but the word must come out— 
that she was pregnant!” 

“À cry escaped me of wonder and incredulity... . 

KT did the very same thing this morning in my confessional,” 
the priest declared, “on hearing her make this assertion, accom- 
panied as it was by every mark of the most genuine and terrible 
despair. I know the child thoroughly; she is absolutely ignorant 
of the world and its wickedness. ... Of all the young girls I 
confess, she is undoubtedly the one I could most unhesitatingly 
answer for before God.—There is no more to tell! We priests 
are the surgeons of souls, and it is our duty to deliver them of 


THE GREATEST LOVE 71 


shameful secrets they would fain conceal, with hands careful 
neither to wound nor pollute. I therefore proceeded, with all 
possible guardedness, to interrogate, question, and cross-question 
the desperate girl. But, the avowal once made, the fault once 
confessed—she calls it a crime herself, and her eternal damnation, 
fully believing herself, poor girl, a lost soul—she thenceforth re- 
fused to say another word, maintaining an obstinate silence which 
she broke only to beseech me to come to you, Madam, to inform 
you of the crime—‘for mamma must know,’ she said, ‘and I shall 
never, never be brave enough to tell her.’ ” 

You may easily imagine with what mingled feelings of 
amazement and anxiety I listened to the curé of Saint-Germain- 
des-Prés. I was just as sure as he was, surer in fact, of my 
little girl’s innocence; but do not the innocent sometimes fall, out 
of very innocence? ... And what she had told the confessor 
was not in the nature of things impossible. ...I did not be- 
lieve it! . . . could not believe it! but still it was not in itself 
impossible! . . . She was only thirteen, but she was a woman, 
and the very fact of her precocity had startled me before now. .. . 
A fever, a frenzy of curiosity came over me. 

KT must and will know all!” I cried excitedly to the worthy 
priest as he stood there listening to me with a bewildered air, 
plucking his hat to pieces in his agitation. “Leave me, Father. 
She would not speak before you; but I am certain she will tell 
me everything . . . I am certain I can drag everything out of her. 
Then we shall understand what is now so utterly incom- 
prehensible.” 

“On this the good priest took his departure. The instant he 
was gone, I sprang upstairs to my daughter’s room, not having 
patience enough to send for her and wait till she came. 

“I found her kneeling—no! not kneeling, prostrate—before her 
crucifix, pale as death, her eyes dry and very red, like eyes that 
have wept many bitter tears. I took her in my arms, seated 
her by my side, and presently on my knees, and told her I could 
not believe what her confessor had just been telling me was true. 


72 THE DIABOLIQUES 


““But here she interrupted me to assure me with a heart- 
broken voice and look that it was true, what he had said; and at 
this point, more and more anxious and wondering, I asked her 
who it was that... 

“‘T left the sentence unfinished. . . . The terrible moment was 
come! She had her head and face on my shoulder... but I 
could see the blush of shame burning on her neck behind, and 
feel her shudder. The same leaden silence she had opposed to 
her father confessor, she now opposed to me. She was im- 
penetrable. 

“<“Tt must be someone very much beneath you, since you are 
so deeply ashamed? . . .” I said, trying to make her speak in 
self-exculpation, for I knew she had plenty of pride. 

“<But still the same silence, the same burying of her head on 
my shoulder. This lasted what seemed to me an infinity of time, 
when suddenly she said, without lifting her head: “Swear you 
will forgive me, Mother!” 

“<I swore everything she asked me, at the risk of perjuring 
myself a hundred times over—little I cared! I was boiling with 
impatience—boiling. . . . I thought my skull would burst and let 
my brains out.... 

£ÆWell, then! it was Monsieur de Ravila,’ she whispered, 
without changing her position in my arms. 

“Oh! the shock of hearing that name, Amédée! At one fell 
swoop I was receiving full and condign punishment for the great 
fault of my life, and my heart quailed within me! You are so 
terrible a man where women are concerned, you have made me 
so fearful of rivals, that those fatal words of doubt, “why not?”— 
so heart-rending when spoken of the man you love, yet suspect 
—rose involuntarily to my lips. What I felt, however, I had reso- 
lution enough left to hide from the cruel child, who had, it may 
be, guessed her mother’s guilty secret. 

“Monsieur de Ravila!” I ejaculated in a tone I feared must 
betray everything; “why, you never even speak to him!”—“You 
avoid him,” I was going to add, for my anger was rising, I felt it 


THE GREATEST LOVE 73 


was. ... “You are surely very deceitful, the pair of you!”— 
But I refrained: was I not bound to learn the details, one by one, 
of this vile tale of seduction? . . . I began to question her with 
an enforced gentleness I thought would have killed me, when 
she released me from the torture of the rack, saying with per- 
fect naïveté: 

“<«“«Tt was one evening, Mother. He was in the big arm- 
chair by the fireside, facing the sofa. . . . He sat there ever so 
long, then presently got up, and I—I had the misfortune to go 
and sit down in the same chair after him. Oh! mamma... 
it was just as if I had fallen into a flame of fire. I wanted to 
get up, but I could not . . . for my heart had stopped beating! 
and I felt . . . Oh! mamma, mamma, I felt . . . that what hurt 
M0" was ababy!...:.??” 

The Marquise laughed, Ravila said, when she told him the 
story; but not one of the twelve women surrounding the table as 
much as thought of laughing—nor Ravila either. 

“And this, ladies, believe me or not, as you please,” he added 
by way of conclusion, “I consider the greatest triumph of my life, 
the passion I am proudest of having inspired.” 

And with this he fell silent—a silence they left unbroken one 
and all. His auditors were pensive. . . . Had they understood 
his meaning? 

What time Joseph was a slave in the Lady Potiphar’s house- 
hold, he was so handsome, says the Koran, that, in their dreamy 
state, the women he waited on at table used to cut their fingers 
with their knives as they gazed at him. But we have travelled 
far since Joseph’s time, and the preoccupations we experience at 
dessert are not so absorbing nowadays. 

“But there, what a consummate idiot, with all her cleverness, 
your Marquise was, to have told you about such a thing!” at last 
said the Duchesse, who condescended to be cynical, but who cut 
neither her fingers nor anything else with the gold dessert-knife 
she still held in her hand. 

Meantime the Comtesse de Chiffrevas was gazing fixedly into 


74 THE DIABOLIQUES 


the depths of a glass of Rhine-wine, a green crystal glass, as pro- 
found and mysterious as her own reverie. 

“And the little witch?” she asked. 

“Oh, she was dead—she died quite young—married to some- 
body in the country—when her mother told me the story,” 
Ravila quietly replied. 

“But for that . . .” said the Duchesse thoughtfully. 


HAPPINESS IN CRIME 


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HAPPINESS IN CRIME 


“In these pleasant days, when a man relates a true story it is to be sup- 
posed that the Devil dictated it.” 


One morning last autumn, I was walking in the zoological gar- 
dens with Doctor Torty, one of my oldest friends. When I was 
still a child, Doctor Torty was practising in the town of V., but 
after thirty years of that agreeable exercise and when all his old 
patients were dead—his tenants, as he called them, who brought 
him more than the tenants do to their landlords in the best part 
of Normandy—he had not cared to look for any others, but, 
being already old and glad to be independent, like a horse that 
has always felt the bit, and has ended by breaking it, he came 
to amuse himself in Paris, and lived in the neighbourhood of the 
Jardin des Plantes—in the Rue Cuvier, I think. He never prac- 
tised medicine then, except for his own pleasure, but that was 
very often, for he was a doctor to the finger-tips, clever in his 
profession and a great observer in many other cases besides 
physiological or pathological ones. 

Have you ever met Doctor Torty? He was one of those bold 
and vigorous minds that you might call “unmittened,” for the 
good and proverbial reason that “a cat in mittens catches no 
mice,” and this wary old mouser had caught a good many, and 
wanted to catch still more. I liked him very much, and, I think, 
for those sides of his character which most displeased others. In 
fact, few people did like this brusque and original old doctor 
when they were well, but, when once they were ill, those who dis- 
liked him the most salaamed to him as the savages did to Robin- 
son Crusoe’s gun, but not for the same reason—because it could 
kill them—but quite a contrary reason—because he could cure 
them. 

77 


78 THE DIABOLIQUES 


Had it not been for that important consideration, the Doctor 
would never have made twenty thousand francs a year in a small, 
devout, and aristocratic town, the chief people of which would 
have shown him the outside of their carriage-gates if they had 
been prompted solely by their opinions and antipathies. He 
reasoned about this very calmly, and even joked about it, during 
his thirty years’ “lease” at V. “They had,” he said, “to choose 
between me and Extreme Unction, and, devout as they were, 
they preferred me to the sacramental oil.” 

As you see, the Doctor did not trouble to restrain himself. His 
wit was rather profane. He was a true disciple of Cabanis in 
medical philosophy, and, like his old comrade, Chaussier, be- 
longed to that terrible school of materialistic doctors, and, like 
Dubois—the first one—was distinguished by a cynical contempt 
for all things, and called duchesses, and the maids of honour of 
the Empress, “my good woman”—treating them with no more 
respect than if they had been fishwives. 

To give you an idea of his cynical humour, I may mention 
that he said one night at the club, as he gazed at the table with 
its snowy white napery, laid with covers for a hundred .and 
twenty guests: “I made them all!” 

Moses could not have been prouder when he showed the rod 
with which he had struck the rock. 

But what could you expect, Madame? He had not the bump 
of respect, and even declared that where that bump existed on 
other men’s heads, there was a hole in his. 

He was old, being more than seventy, but square-built, robust, 
and wiry, with a sarcastic face under his light chestnut, shiny, 
short wig, and penetrating eyes that never needed glasses. He 
dressed nearly always in grey, or that shade of brown which was 
long called “Moscow smoke,” and looked very unlike the Paris 
doctors, stiff in their white cravats like their dead patients in their 
winding-sheets. 

He was quite a different sort of man. His doeskin gloves and 
thick-soled boots gave him something of the look of a horseman— 


HAPPINESS IN CRIME 70 


as indeed he was, for he had ridden every day for thirty years 
over roads which would have broken a centaur in half. His 
strong legs, which had never felt a twinge of rheumatism, were 
bowed like a postilion’s. He might have been called a French 
provincial Leatherstocking, and, like Fenimore Cooper’s hero, 
he laughed at the laws of society and had not replaced them 
by the idea of God. Such a close observer could not fail to be 
a misanthrope—and he was. But he was not a misanthrope like 
Alceste. He never displayed any virtuous indignation, nor was 
he ever angry. No, he simply despised man as quietly as he 
took a pinch of snuff, and had not even as much pleasure in the 
scorn as he had in the pinch. Such was, in short, the character 
of Doctor Torty, with whom I was then walking. 

The day was one of those bright, clear autumn days which 
prevent the swallows from leaving. Noon had just sounded 
from Notre-Dame, and the deep boom of the bell sounded in long 
thrills over the river. The red foliage of the trees had shaken 
off the blue fog which envelops them on October mornings, and 
the sun was agreeably warm on our backs, as the Doctor and I 
stopped to look at the famous black panther, which died the fol- 
lowing winter of lung-disease—just as though it had been a 
young girl. 

All round us was the usual public of the zoological gardens, 
soldiers and nurse-maids, who love to stroll round the cages and 
throw nutshells and orange-peel at the sleepy animals. The 
panther, before whose cage we had arrived, was of that particular 
species which comes from the island of Java, the country where 
nature is most luxuriant, and seems itself like some great tigress 
untamable by man. In Java the flowers have more brilliancy 
and perfume, the fruits more taste, the animals more beauty and 
strength, than in any other country in the world. 

Lying gracefully with its paws stretched out in front, its head 
up, and its emerald eyes motionless, the panther was a splendid 
specimen of the savage products of the country. Not a touch 
of yellow sullied its black velvet skin—of a blackness so deep 


80 THE DIABOLIQUES 


and dull that the sunlight was absorbed by it as water is absorbed 
by a sponge. When you turned from this ideal form of supple 
beauty—of terrific force in repose—of silent and royal disdain— 
to the human creatures who were timidly gazing at it, open-eyed 
and open-mouthed, it was not the human beings who had the 
superiority over the animal. The latter was so much the supe- 
rior that the comparison was humiliating. 

I had just whispered this remark to the Doctor, when two 
persons made their way through the group, and planted them- 
selves just in front of the panther. 

“Yes,” said the Doctor, “but look now, and you will see that 
the equilibrium between the species is restored.” 

They were a man and a woman, both tall, and I guessed at a 
glance that they both belonged to the upper ranks of society. 
Neither was young, but both were handsome. The man might 
have been forty-seven or more, and the woman upwards of forty. 
They had therefore, as sailors say, “crossed the line”—that fatal 
line more terrible than the equator. But they appeared to care 
very little, and showed no signs of melancholy. 

The man, in a tightly fitting black coat, resembled, in his 
haughty but effeminate bearing, one of the mignons of Henry III, 
and, to make the resemblance more complete, he wore his hair 
short, and in his ears were dark-blue sapphire ear-rings, which 
reminded one of the two emeralds which Sbogar wore in the same 
place. Except for this ridiculous detail—as the world would have 
called it—and which showed a disdain for the tastes and opinions 
of the time, he was simply a dandy in the sense in which Brum- 
mell understood the word, that is to “be not remarkable,” and he 
would have passed unnoticed had it not been for the woman he 
had on his arm. 

In fact, this woman attracted more attention than the man who 
accompanied her, and held it longer. She was as tall as he was. 
Her head was nearly on a level with his. And as she was dressed 
entirely in black, she made one think of the black Isis of the 


HAPPINESS IN CRIME 81 
Egyptian Museum, by her shape, her mysterious pride, and her 


strength. For, strange to say, in this handsome couple it was 
the woman who had the muscles, and the man who possessed the 
nerves. 

I could see only her profile, but the profile is either the greatest 
peril of beauty or its most astonishing manifestation. Never 
had I seen a purer or more noble outline. Of her eyes I could 
not judge, fixed as they were upon the panther, which, no doubt, 
received therefrom a magnetic and disagreeable impression, for, 
though motionless before, it became yet more rigid, and, without 
moving its head or even its whiskers, it slowly dropped its eye- 
lids over its emerald eyes—as a cat will do when dazzled by a 
strong light—and seemed unable to meet the fixed glance of the 
woman. 

“Ah, ah! Panther against panther,” the Doctor murmured in 
my ear; “but the satin is stronger than the velvet.” 

The satin was the woman, who wore a dress of that gleaming 
material—a dress with a long train. The Doctor was right. 
Black, supple, as powerfully muscular, and as royal in bearing— 
quite as beautiful in her own way, and with a charm still more 
disquieting—this woman, this unknown person, resembled a hu- 
man panther opposed to the brute panther whom she had con- 
quered; and the animal no doubt felt it when it had closed its eyes. 

But the woman—if she was one—was not content with her 
triumph. She was wanting in generosity. She wished that her 
rival should see that it was humiliated, and should open its eyes 
on purpose to see it. Without saying a word, she undid the 
twelve buttons of the violet glove which fitted so closely her mag- 
nificent arm, took off the glove, and, daringly putting her hand 
between the bars of the cage, flicked the panther’s muzzle with 
it. The panther made but one movement—but such a move- 
ment!—and snapped its teeth like lightning. A cry went up from 
the little group around. We thought her hand must be bitten 
off at the wrist. But it was only the glove. The panther had 


82 THE DIABOLIQUES 


swallowed it. The terrible beast, deeply insulted, had opened its 
eyes to their full size, and its nostrils quivered with anger. 

“Fool!” said the man, seizing the beautiful hand which had 
just escaped this terrible bite. 

You know how that word “fool” is sometimes said. That was 
how he said it, as he passionately kissed her hand. 

And as he was on the same side as we were, she turned slightly 
to look at him, and I saw her eyes—eyes which fascinated tigers, 
and were at present fascinated by eyes which were two large 
black diamonds expressing all the pride of life, and adoration of 
love. 

Those eyes were, and told, a whole poem. The man had not 
released the arm which had just felt the feverish breath of the 
panther, and, holding it to his heart, led the woman to the broad 
walk of the garden, indifferent to the murmurs and exclamations 
of the people—still somewhat excited by the incident—and walked 
quietly along it. They passed close to the Doctor and me, but 
their faces were turned towards each other, and they were pressing 
so close together that it seemed as though they wished to make 
one body of the two, and see nothing but themselves. They were 
both, as one could see when they passed, of those superior beings 
who do not even perceive that their feet touch the ground, and 
who pass through the world in a cloud, like the immortals of 
Homer. 

Such people are rare in Paris, and we therefore stopped to 
watch this splendid couple—the woman allowing the long train 
to trail in the dust, like a peacock disdainful of its plumage. 

They looked superb as they passed along, under the rays of the 
midday sun, in all the majesty of their mutual embrace. We 
watched them to the gate, where a carriage, the horses resplendent 
in plated harness, was waiting for them. 

“They forget the universe,” I said to the Doctor. 

“Oh, a lot they care for the universe!” he replied in his sar- 
castic voice. “They see nothing in all creation, and, what is 
worse, they even pass close to their doctor without noticing him.” 


HAPPINESS IN CRIME 83 


“What, you, Doctor!” I cried. “Then you can tell me who 
they are, my dear Doctor.” 

The Doctor made a long pause, in order to produce an effect— 
the cunning old man! 

“Well!” he said quietly, “they are Philemon and Baucis—that’s 
ally’ 

“Rather a proud-looking Philemon and Baucis,” I replied, “and 
not much resembling those of antiquity. But that is not their 
name, Doctor. What is their name?” 

“What!” replied the Doctor; “in the fashionable society in 
which you mix, you have never heard the Comte and Comtesse 
Serlon de Savigny held up as the models of conjugal love?” 

“No,” I replied; “in the fashionable world in which I mix, we 
do not talk much about conjugal love.” 

“Hum! Hum! that is very probable,” said the Doctor—more 
in answer to his own thoughts than to mine. “In that society— 
which you mix, you have never heard the Comte and Comtesse 
rect happy. But, besides having another reason for not going 
into society, they live nearly all the year in their old chateau at 
Savigny, in the Cotentin. Some reports about them circulated in 
the Faubourg Saint-Germain, but as the nobility all hang to- 
gether, they are never mentioned there now.” 

“What were these reports? You interest me greatly, Doctor. 
The chateau of Savigny is not very far from the town of V., 
where you used to practise, Doctor, so you must know something 
about them.” 

“Oh, those reports!” said the Doctor, pensively taking a pinch 
of snuff. “They were believed to be false. It all passed over. 
But although marriages of inclination, and the happiness which 
springs from them, are the ideals of all mothers in the country, 
who are generally virtuous and romantic, they did not talk very 
much—at least those I knew—to their daughters about this par- 
ticular one.” 

“And yet you called them Philemon and Baucis, Doctor.” 

“Baucis! Baucis! Hum!” interrupted Doctor Torty, crooking 


12 


84 THE DIABOLIQUES 


his first finger and passing it over his long parrot-like nose (one 
of his gestures); “don’t you think that woman looks less like 
Baucis than Lady Macbeth?” 

“Doctor—my dear and adorable Doctor,” I continued as coax- 
ingly as I could, “you will tell me all you know about the Comte 
and Comtesse de Savigny—won’t you?” 

“The doctor is the confessor in these times,” said the Doctor, 
in a mock-serious manner. “He has replaced the priest, sir, and, 
like the priest, is obliged to keep the secrets of confession.” 

_ He looked at me mischievously, for he knew my respect and 
“regard for the Catholic religion, of which he was the enemy. He 
winked, and thought he had caught me. 

“And he is going to keep it—as the priest does!” he cried with 
a cynical laugh. “Come along with me where we can talk.” 

He led me to the broad walk which runs between the zoological 
gardens and the Boulevard de l'Hôpital; we sat down on one of 
the benches, and he began. 

“My dear fellow, you must search pretty deeply for the begin- 
ning of my story, as you would for a bullet over which the flesh 
has formed; for oblivion is like the flesh of living things which 
forms over events and prevents you from seeing anything, or even 
suspecting the place after a certain time. 

“It was in the first years after the Restoration. A regiment 
of the Guards passed through the town of V., and, being obliged, 
for some military reason or other, to stay there two days, the 
officers determined to give an assault of arms in honour of the 
town. As a matter of fact, the town fully deserved that the 
officers of the Guards should do it that honour. It was, as they 
said then, more royalist than the King. Considering its size (for 
it contained barely five or six thousand souls), it teemed with 
nobility. More than thirty young men belonging to the best 
families of the place were then serving either in the Life Guards 
or the Prince’s Regiment, and the officers then passing through V. 
knew them nearly all. But the principal reason which induced 
the officers to give this assault of arms was the fighting reputation 


HAPPINESS IN CRIME 85 


of V. The Revolution of 1789 had taken away from the nobles 
the right to wear their swords, but at V. they proved that if 
they no longer wore them, they knew how to use them. 

“The assault given by the officers was a brilliant success. 

“It brought together all the best swordsmen of the district, and 
even some amateurs who belonged to a younger generation, and 
who had not much cultivated, as they did in former days, an art 
so difficult and complicated as fencing; and all showed such en- 
thusiasm for the glorious weapon of our forefathers that an old 
fencing-instructor of the regiment, who had served his time three 
or four times over, and whose arm was covered with good-conduct 
stripes, thought that it would be a good idea to open a school of 
arms at V. and end his days there; and the Colonel, to whom he 
broached the subject, approved of the plan, and gave him his 
discharge. 

“The idea was quite a stroke of genius on the part of the 
fencing-master, whose name was Stassin, but who was more gen- 
erally known as ‘Old Straight-thrust.’ 

“For a long time past there had been no properly conducted 
fencing-school at V. This had long been a subject of regret 
amongst the nobility, who were obliged to teach their own sons, 
or else have recourse to some friend who had left the army, and 
who was perhaps not a good swordsman, or did not know how to 
teach. | 

“The inhabitants of V. prided themselves on being very par- 
ticular. They really possessed the sacred fire. It was not enough 
to be able to kill their man—they wished to kill him neatly and 
scientifically according to the principles of art. They were most 
particular about a graceful attitude, and had a profound contempt 
for those strong but awkward swordsmen who might be dangerous 
antagonists in a duel, but who were not fencers in the strict sense 
of the word. 

““Old Straight-thrust’ had been a good man in his youth, and 
was so still, When quite a young man, he had beaten all the 
other instructors in the camp, and had carried off the prize—a 


86 THE DIABOLIQUES 


pair of silver-mounted foils and masks—and in fact was one of 
those swordsmen who are exceptionally endowed by nature, and 
cannot be produced by art. He was, naturally, the admiration of 
all V., and soon was something more. The sword is a great level- 
ler. In the days of the old monarchy, kings ennobled their 
fencing-master. Louis XV—if I recollect rightly—gave his mas- 
ter, Danet (who has left us a book on fencing), four of his fleurs- 
de-lis, between two crossed swords, as his coat of arms. These 
country gentlemen, who were stuffed full of monarchical ideas, 
very soon looked upon the old fencing-master as an equal, and 
as though he had been one of themselves. 

“So far, Stassin, otherwise known as ‘Old Straight-thrust,’ was 
to be congratulated on his good fortune; but, unfortunately, the 
red-morocco heart on the white-leather padded jacket, which the 
old fencing-master put on when he gave a lesson, was not the 
only one he possessed. 

“He had, underneath that one, another heart which sought for 
an affinity amongst all the young women of V. A soldier’s heart 
is always made of gunpowder, it would seem; and when age has 
dried the powder, it catches fire all the more readily. Most of 
the women of V. are pretty, so there were plenty of sparks every- 
where, ready for the dry powder of the fencing-master, and his 
history was that of a great many other old soldiers. After hav- 
ing knocked about in all the countries of Europe, and chucked 
under the chin, or taken round the waist, all the girls whom the 
Devil had put in his road, the old soldier of the First Empire 
committed his last folly by marrying, when he was past fifty, and 
with all the necessary formalities and sacraments—at the munici- 
pality and the church—a working-girl from V. Of course, she— 
I know the working-girls of that country, I have attended enough 
of them in childbirth!—presented him at the end of nine months, 
day for day, with a child; and that child, who was a girl, is no 
other, my dear fellow, than the woman with the air of a goddess 
who has just passed, brushing us insolently with ‘her robe, and 
taking no more notice of us than though we had not been there.” 


HAPPINESS IN CRIME 87 

“The Comtesse de Savigny!” I cried. 

“Yes, the Comtesse de Savigny herself! Ah, you must not look 
at the origin of women any more than of nations; you should 
never look into anyone’s cradle. I remember having seen at 
Stockholm that of Charles XII, which looked like a horse’s man- 
ger, was roughly coloured in red, and did not stand level on its 
four legs. Yet that was what that tempest of a man came out 
of. Besides, all cradles are sewers, of which you are obliged to 
change the linen several times a day, and that is never poetical 
for those who believe in poetry, but when the child is no longer 
there.” 

And to strengthen his dictum, the Doctor, at this point of his 
story, struck his thigh with one of his doeskin gloves, which he 
held by the middle finger, and the noise the doeskin made against 
his thigh proved to one who knows something about music that 
the Doctor was not deficient in muscle. 

He waited, but I did not contradict his statements, and, seeing 
that I said nothing, he continued: 

“Like all old soldiers, who are even fond of other people’s chil- 
dren—‘Old Straight-thrust’? doted on his. There was nothing 
astonishing in that. When a man who is already old has a child, 
he loves it more than though he were young, for vanity, which 
doubles everything, doubles also the paternal instinct. All the 
fellows I have known who became fathers late in life, adored 
their offspring, and were as comically proud of it as though it 
were a wonderful action. Nature, who was laughing at them, 
had persuaded them in their hearts that they were young again. 
I know of only one happiness more intoxicating, one pride more 
droll; and that is when an old man, instead of one child, makes 
two at once. ‘Old Straight-thrust’ had not the paternal pride 
of being the father of twins, but it is certain that his child was 
big enough to make two ordinary ones. His daughter—you 
have seen her, and know whether she turned out as well as 
she promised—was a wonderful child, both for strength and 
beauty. 


88 THE DIABOLIQUES 


“The first care of the old fencing-master was to look out for 
a godfather amongst the noblemen who continually haunted his 
school, and he chose, from amongst them all, the Comte d’Avice, 
the oldest of all the wielders of the foil, and who, during the 
emigration, had himself been a fencing-master in London, at ever 
so many guineas a lesson. 

“Comte d’Avice de Sortoville, in Beaumont, who was already 
a knight of St. Louis and a captain of dragoons before the Revo- 
lution—and who was at least seventy years of age—could still 
‘button’ the young fellows in fine style. He was a mischievous 
old rascal, and some of his jokes were rather ferocious. ‘Thus, 
for instance, he would pass the blade of his foil through the flame 
of a candle, and when he had rendered it so hard that it would 
not bend, and would smash your breastbone or your ribs, he would 
call it his ‘rascal-driver,’ 

“He was very fond of ‘Old Straight-thrust, and treated him 
familiarly. “The daughter of a man like you,’ he said, ‘should 
be named after the sword of an illustrious warrior. Call her 
Haute Claire.’ 

“And that was the name that was given her. The parish priest 
of V. made rather a grimace at this unacustomed name, which had 
never been heard at the font of his church, but as the sponsor 
was the Comte d’Avice, and there will always be, in spite of the 
liberals and their tricks, indestructible ties between the nobility 
and the clergy, and as, on the other hand, there is a saint named 
Claire in the Roman calendar, the name of Oliver’s sword was 
given to the child without the town of V. being greatly disturbed 
thereby. 

“Such a name seemed to augur a destiny. The old fencing- 
master, who loved his profession almost as much as his daughter, 
resolved to teach her, and to leave her his talent as a marriage 
portion. But a poor’pittance considering modern fashions—which 
the old instructor could not foresee. 

“As soon as the child could stand, he began to teach her ex- 
ercises, and as the little girl was solidly built, with joints like 


HAPPINESS IN CRIME 89 


thin steel, he developed her in such an amazing manner that at 
ten years old she seemed to be fifteen, and could hold her own with 
the foils against her father, or the best fencers of the town of 
V. Little Hauteclaire Stassin was talked about everywhere, and 
later she became Mademoiselle Hauteclaire Stassin. It was more 
especially, as you may suppose, amongst the young ladies of the 
town—into whose society, however well he might stand with their 
fathers, the daughter of Stassin, called ‘Old Straight-thrust,’ could 
not decently enter—that there was an incredible (or rather a per- 
fectly credible) curiosity about her, mixed with spite and envy. 
Their fathers and brothers spoke of her with astonishment and 
admiration before them, and they wished to inspect closely this 
female St. George whose beauty was said to equal her skill in 
fencing. They saw her only at a distance. I was then living at 
V., and I was often a witness of this burning curiosity. ‘Old 
Straight-thrust,’ who had, during the Empire, served in the Hus- 
sars, and who had made a good deal of money with his fencing- 
school, had bought a horse in order that he might give lessons 
in riding to his daughter, and as all the year round he had young 
horses to. break in for some of his pupils, he often rode with 
Hauteclaire along the roads which surround the town. 

“I met them many times when returning from my professional 
visits, and in these meetings I was able to judge of the extreme 
interest which this fine tall young woman had aroused amongst the 
other young women of the district. I was always riding about the 
roads at that time, and I frequently saw young ladies in carriages 
going to make calls at some of the neighbouring chateaux. Well! 
you should have seen with what haste, and I may say with what 
imprudence, they rushed to the carriage-windows whenever 
Mademoiselle Hauteclaire Stassin was seen on the road, riding 
alongside her father. But their trouble was useless, and the next 
day when I called on their mothers they would tell me that 
they had seen nothing but the figure of the young woman, her 
face being more or less concealed beneath a thick, blue veil. 

“Mademoiselle Hauteclaire Stassin was known only to the men 


90 THE DIABOLIQUES 
of V. Foil in hand, and her face hidden by the mask, which she 
seldom removed, she hardly ever left the fencing-school, and 
often gave lessons in place of her father, who was beginning to 
grow feeble. She rarely showed herself in the street, and though 
she went to Mass every Sunday, both at church and in the street 
she was as much masked as she was in the school. Was there 
conceit or affectation in thus hiding herself from the public gaze? 
It is very possible; but who knows?—who can say? And was 
not this young woman, who dropped the mask only for the veil, 
as impenetrable in character as she was in face?—as events well 
proved! 

“You will understand, my dear fellow, that I am obliged to pass 
rapidly over the details of this period in order to arrive at the 
moment when my story really begins. Mademoiselle Hauteclaire 
was then about seventeen. ‘Old Straight-thrust’ had become a 
stout old bourgeois. He had lost his wife, and he himself was 
morally killed by the Revolution of July, which sent all the nobles 
grieving off to their châteaux, and emptied the fencing-school. 
Moreover, the gout, which was not afraid of the old master’s 
challenges, had attacked him, and was taking him as fast as pos- 
sible to the cemetery. To a doctor knowing anything of diagnosis 
there was no doubt about that; it was easy enough to see, and I 
gave him but a short time to live. 

“One morning there was brought to the fencing-school—by the 
Vicomte de Taillebois and Chevalier de Mesnilgrand—a young 
man who, after being educated in some distant place, had re- 
turned to inhabit his ancestral chateau, his father having recently 
died. This was the Comte Serlon de Savigny, the suitor (as they 
said in the town) of Mademoiselle Delphine de Cantor. The 
Comte de Savigny was certainly one of the most distinguished of 
the swell youth of the locality. There are none of them left now. 
He had heard much of the famous Hauteclaire Stassin, and wanted 
to see this miracle. He found her to be what she was, a beautiful 
young girl, looking provokingly attractive in her silk hose, which 
showed off the shape of a form like the Pallas of Velletri, and the 


HAPPINESS IN CRIME 91 


black morocco jacket tightly fitting her supple and strong figure 
—one of those figures which the Circassian women obtain by con- 
fining their daughters in a leather belt, which the development 
of the body breaks. 

“Hauteclaire Stassin was as serious as a Clorinda. 

“He watched her give her lesson, and asked if he might be 
permitted to cross swords with her. But the Comte de Savigny 
was not the Tancred of the situation. Mademoiselle Hauteclaire 
Stassin bent her foil into a semicircle ever so many times on the 
heart of the handsome Serlon, and she was not touched once. 

““T cannot touch you, Mademoiselle,’ he said courteously. 

“ “Ts that an omen?’ 

“Was the young man’s conceit overcome by love? 

“From that time, the Comte de Savigny went every day to the 
fencing-school of ‘Old Straight-thrust’ to take a lesson. 

“The Comte’s chateau was only a few leagues distant, and he 
could easily ride or drive into the town without remark, for though 
the slightest thing was enough to provoke scandal, the love of 
fencing explained all. Savigny took no one into his confidence. 
He even avoided taking his lesson at the same time as the other 
young men of the town. He was a young man who was not 
wanting in cunning. What passed between him and Hauteclaire, 
if anything passed at all, no one knew or suspected. His marriage 
with Mademoiselle Delphine de Cantor had been arranged by the 
two families years before, and was too far advanced for either 
party to be able to draw back. ‘They were married three months 
after his return, and he took the opportunity of spending a month 
in V. near his fiancée, with whom he passed all his days in the 
orthodox manner, but whom he left in the evening that he might 
take his fencing-lesson. 

“Like everybody else in the town, Mademoiselle Hauteclaire 
heard the banns of Comte de Savigny and Mademoiselle de Cantor 
proclaimed at the parish church of V., but neither her attitude 
nor her face betrayed that she took any interest whatever in those 
public declarations. It is true that no one was on the look-out, 


92 THE DIABOLIQUES 


no liaison between Savigny and the fair Hauteclaire being sus- 
pected. The marriage having been celebrated, the Comtesse went 
to live quietly in her chateau, but her husband did not give up 
his usual habits, and came to town every day. Many of the other 
gentlemen of the locality did the same, however. 

“Time went on. “Old Straight-thrust’ died. The school was 
shut for a short time, and then opened again. Mademoiselle 
Hauteclaire Stassin announced that she would keep the school 
open, and, so far from having fewer pupils than before her father’s 
death, it had more. Men are all the same. Anything strange 
displeases them, if it is done by another man; but if it is done by 
anyone in petticoats, they rather like it. A woman who does what 
a man does, though she may not do it half so well, will always 
have a marked advantage over a man, especially in France. But 
what Mademoiselle Hauteclaire Stassin did, she did better than 
a man. She was more skilful than her father. As a professor 
she could demonstrate admirably, and her sword-play was 
splendid. She had coups which were irresistible—those coups 
which are not learned any more than the wrist-work of a violin- 
player, and cannot be taught to anyone. 

“T used to fence a little in those days, as everyone else round 
me did, and I must confess that some of her passes were simply 
wonderful. Amongst other things, she had a way of disengaging 
from carte to tierce, which was like magic. It was not a foil 
that hit you, it was a bullet. Parry as rapidly as a man would, 
his blade only cut the air, even when she had warned him that 
she was about to disengage, and he was infallibly hit on the shoul- 
der or breast, without his blade being able even to meet hers. I 
have seen swordsmen become quite wild at this coup, which they 
called sleight of hand, and ready to swallow their foil in fury. If 
she had not been a woman, they would have tried to pick a quarrel 
with her about that coup. A man would have had twenty duels 
on his hands. 

“But apart from this phenomenal talent, so little suited for a 
woman, this poor young girl, who had no resource but her foil, 


HAPPINESS IN CRIME 93 


and mixed with all the rich young men of the town—amongst 
whom there were some sad scapegraces, and some conceited asses 
—without her reputation suffering at all, was an interesting person. 

“Nothing was said about Mademoiselle Hauteclaire Stassin con- 
cerning either Savigny or anyone else. ‘It seems that she is an 
honest woman,’ said all the respectable folks—as though they had 
been talking of an actress. 

“I myself—as I have been talking about myself—who prided 
myself on my powers of observation, was of the same opinion 
as all the town concerning the virtue of Hauteclaire. I sometimes 
went to the fencing-school, both before and after the marriage of 
Monsieur de Savigny, and I never saw anything but a grave 
young woman performing her business simply. She had, I ought 
to say, a commanding air, and made everybody treat her with re- 
spect, and she was not familiar with anyone. Her face was ex- 
tremely haughty, and had not then that passionate expression 
with which you have been so struck, but it showed neither chagrin, 
nor preoccupation, nor anything of a nature to suggest in the 
most distant manner the astonishing circumstance which, in the 
atmosphere of the quiet and plodding little town, had the same 
effect as the report of a cannon, and broke the windows. 

“Mademoiselle Hauteclaire Stassin has disappeared!’ 

“She had disappeared! How? Why? Where had she gone? 
No one knew; but what was certain was that she had disappeared. 
First there was an outcry, followed by silence, but the silence 
did not last long. Tongues began to wag. They had been long 
kept in—like the water in a mill-stream which, when the flood- 
gates are opened, rushes out and makes the wheel spin round 
furiously—and now began to chatter about this unexpected disap- 
pearance which nothing could explain, for Mademoiselle Haute- 
claire had disappeared without saying a word or leaving a word 
to or for anybody. She had disappeared as people disappear 
when they wish really to disappear—not leaving behind them 
some trifling trace which others can seize to explain their disap- 
pearance. She had disappeared in the most complete manner. 


94 THE DIABOLIQUES 


She had not done ‘a moonlight flit,” as it is termed, for she had 
not left a single debt behind her. 

“The neighbours’ tongue-mill had nothing to grind, but it 
turned all the same, and ground her reputation to bits. 

“All that was known about her was told, retold, powdered, and 
sifted. How, and with whom, had this proud and reserved girl 
run away? Who had carried her off?—for it was certain that 
someone had carried her off. No reply could be given. It was 
enough to drive any little town mad, and V. became mad. There 
were motives for its indignation. Only fancy what the town had 
lost. Firstly, it lost its time in guessing about a girl it thought 
it knew and did not know, because it had not judged her capable 
of disappearing ‘like that” Then it had lost the girl herself, who 
ought to have grown old or married, like all the other girls of 
the town, but never have moved off the chess-board of life in a 
country town. And finally, in losing Mademoiselle Stassin (who 
was now spoken of only as ‘that Stassin woman’), the town had 
lost a school of arms, celebrated through all the country round, 
the ornament and honour of the town, and a feather in its cap. 

“All these losses were very hard to bear, and were so many 
reasons comprised in one for throwing all the mud that supposi- 
tion would allow upon the irreproachable Hauteclaire. And the 
mud was thrown. Except a few old gentlemen who were too 
grand to indulge in gossip, and who, like her godfather, the Comte 
d’Avice, had known her as a child, and who, if they thought about 
the matter at all, regarded it as very natural that she had found 
a better shoe for her foot than a fencing-sandal, not a soul de- 
fended the disappearance of Hauteclaire Stassin. She had 
offended the self-conceit of all; and the youngest were the most 
bitter against her, because she had not run away with one of them. 

“That was for a long time their great grief and their great 
anxiety. With whom had she run away? Many of the young 
men went every year to spend a month or two of the winter in 
Paris, and two or three of them declared they had seen and recog- 
nized her there—at the theatre—or on horseback in the Champs 


HAPPINESS IN CRIME 95 


Elysées—alone or in company—but they were not quite sure. 
They could affirm nothing. It might have been she, or it might 
not have been. But it showed how much she was thought about, 
this girl they had all so much admired, and who in disappearing 
had thrown consternation into this sword-loving town, of which 
she was the leading artiste—the diva—the star. When that star 
was extinguished—in other words, after the disapearance of the 
celebrated Hauteclaire—the town of V. fell into that state of leth- 
argy which is the normal condition of all country towns which 
have not a centre of activity towards which all castes and passions 
converge. ‘The love of arms grew weak, and without the youthful 
swordsmen the town was dull. The young nobles who used to 
ride into the town every day to fence, exchanged the foil for the 
gun. They became sportsmen, and remained on their own es- 
tates, or in their woods—the Comte de Savigny like all the others. 
He came to V. less and less frequently, and when I did meet him 
occasionally, it was at the house of his wife’s parents, who were 
patients of mine. 

“Only, as I did not suspect at that time that he was in any 
way connected with the disappearance of Hauteclaire, I had no 
reason to speak to him about it—indeed, people had got tired of 
talking of it by that time—nor did he ever speak to me of Haute- 
claire, or the occasions when we had met at the fencing-school, 
or even make the slightest allusion to her.” 

“I can hear your little wooden shoes coming,” I said to the 
Doctor, using an expression current in the district about which he 
was talking, and which is also my native country. “It was he 
who had abducted her.” 

“Oh, no! not at all,” replied the Doctor. “Better than that. 
But you would never guess what it was. 

“Besides, in the country especially, an elopement is not very 
easily kept secret, and, moreover, the Comte de Savigny had never 
since his marriage left the chateau of Savigny. 

“He lived there, as everybody knew, along with his wife, in 
what appeared to be a perpetual honeymoon—and as everything 


96 THE DIABOLIQUES 


is remarked and talked about in the country, remarks were made 
about Savigny, and he was cited as one of those husbands who 
are so rare that they ought to be burned (provincial humour) 
and their ashes thrown over the others. Heaven only knows how 
long I myself should have been duped by this reputation, if it 
had not happened—more than a year after the disappearance of 
Hauteclaire Stassin—that I was suddenly called one day to the 
chateau of Savigny, the lady of the house having been taken ill. 

“I started at once, and on my arrival was taken to the Comtesse, 
who was in reality suffering from one of those vague and com- 
plicated diseases which are more dangerous than a severe attack 
of some ordinary malady. She was one of those women of good 
family who are worn out, elegant, distinguished, and proud, and 
whose pale faces and pinched forms seem to say, ‘I am conquered 
by the era, like all my race. I die, but I despise you,’ and, devil 
take me! plebeian as I am, though it is not very philosophic, if 
I can helping admiring that spirit! 

“The Comtesse was lying on a couch in a kind of parlour with 
white walls and black beams, very large, very high, and decorated 
with a profusion of old furniture which did honour to the taste 
of the old Counts of Savigny. A solitary lamp lighted this vast 
apartment, and its light, rendered more mysterious by the green 
shade which veiled it, fell on the Comtesse, whose face was flushed 
with fever. She had been ill some days, and Savigny—in order 
to watch her the better—had had a small bed placed by the side 
of the couch of his well-beloved better half. But the fever was 
not to be shaken off, and had become worse in spite of all his 
attention, and therefore he had sent for me. He was standing 
there, with his back to the fire, looking so gloomy and disturbed 
as to make me believe that he passionately loved his wife, and 
believed her to be in danger. But the disturbed expression on 
his face was not for her, but for another, whom I did not suspect 
to be at the chateau de Savigny, and the sight of whom amazed 
me beyond measure. It was Hauteclaire.” 

“The devil! That was risky!” I said to the Doctor. 


HAPPINESS IN CRIME 97 


“So risky,’ he replied, “that I thought I must be dreaming 
when I saw her. The Comtesse had requested her husband to 
ring for her maid, who had been told, before my arrival, to pre- 
pare a drink I had ordered—and some seconds later the door 
opened. 

““Eulalie, where is the tisane I asked for?’ said the Comtesse 
impatiently. 

“ “Here it is, Madame,’ replied a voice that I seemed to recog- 
nize, and it had no sooner struck my ear than I saw emerge from 
the shadow which enveloped the greater part of the room, and 
advance into the circle of light thrown by the lamp round the 
bed, Hauteclaire Stassin—yes, Hauteclaire, herself!—holding in 
her beautiful hands a silver waiter, on which smoked the bowl for 
which the Comtesse had asked. Such a sight was enough to take 
away my breath! Eulalie! 

“Fortunately, the name of Eulalie pronounced so naturally, told 
me all, and was like a blow with a hammer of ice which restored 
the coolness I had lost, and enabled me to resume my attitude 
as doctor and observer. 

“Hauteclaire had become Eulalie, and lady’s maid to the Com- 
tesse de Savigny! Her disguise—if such a woman can be dis- 
guised—was complete. She wore the costume of the girls of V. 
and their head-dress, which resembles a helmet, and their long 
corkscrew curls falling each side of the cheeks—those corkscrews 
which the preachers of those days called serpents in order to try 
and disgust the pretty girls with them—which they never succeeded 
in doing. 

“Her eyes were cast down, and she looked beautiful, reserved, 
and dignified, which only proves that those vipers of women can 
do whatever they like with their confounded bodies whenever it 
is to their interest to do so. Having recovered myself, like a man 
who bites his lips in order to prevent a cry of surprise escaping 
him, I had a desire to show this impudent woman that I recog- 
nized her, and whilst the Comtesse drank her potion, and her face 
was hidden by the bowl, I fixed my eyes on Eulalie’s eyes, but 


98 THE DIABOLIQUES 


hers—as mild as a fawn’s that evening—were firmer than those 
of the panther she had just stared down. She never winked. 

“The hands which held the platter trembled almost impercep- 
tibly, but that was all. The Comtesse drank very slowly, and 
when she had finished— 

“Very good! Take it away,’ she said. 

“And Hauteclaire-Eulalie walked away with that tournure that 
I should have recognized amongst all the twenty thousand 
daughters of Ahasuerus. I will own that I did not look at the 
Comte de Savigny for a minute, for I felt what a look from one 
would mean at such an instant; but when I did venture to do so, 
I found his gaze fixed upon me, and his face turned from an ex- 
pression of terrible anxiety to one of deliverance. 

“He saw that I knew, but he saw also that J did not intend to 
know, and he breathed more freely. He was sure of my impene- 
trable discretion, which he explained probably (but I did not care 
about that) by my interest as a doctor to retain such a good cus- 
tomer as he was, whilst really it was only the interest I took as 
an observer, who did not want the doors of a house where such 
interesting events were going on, to be closed against him. 

“So I returned with my finger on my lips, well resolved not 
to breathe a word to a single person, or give anyone any cause 
to suspect. Ah, what pleasure it is to be an observer, what im- 
personal and solitary pleasures one enjoys, and which I promised 
myself in this quiet corner of the country, in this old chateau, 
to which as a doctor I could come whenever I liked! 

“Glad to be delivered from his anxiety, Savigny had said to me: 
‘Come every day, Doctor, until further orders.’ 

“I could therefore study with as much interest as though it had 
been a disease, the mystery of a situation which no one would 
have deemed credible if they had been informed of it. And as, 
from the very first day, this mystery had aroused my ratiocina- 
tive faculties, which are the blind man’s stick to the savant, and 
especially to the doctor, in their curious researches. I began im- 
mediately to reason out the situation in order that I might under- 


HAPPINESS IN CRIME 99 


stand it. How long had it existed? Did it date from the 
disappearance of Hauteclaire? That was more than a year ago— 
had Hauteclaire Stassin been lady’s maid to the Comtesse de 
Savigny all that time? How was it that no one had ever seen 
what I had seen so easily and so quickly? All these questions 
jumped on my horse with me, and rode along with me to V., ac- 
companied by many others which I picked up on the road. 

“The Comte and Comtesse de Savigny, who were believed to 
adore each other, lived, it is true, remote from all society. But 
still a visitor might drop in at the chateau at any time. It is 
true that if the visitor were a man, Hauteclaire need not appear; 
and if the visitor were a lady, the ladies of V. had not seen (suf- 
ficiently to be able to recognize) a girl who hardly ventured out 
of the school of arms, and who, when seen at a distance on horse- 
back or in church, wore purposely a thick veil—for Hauteclaire 
(as I have said) had always possessed that pride of the very 
proud, who are offended at too much curiosity, and the more they 
are gazed at, the more they try to hide themselves. As for the 
servants of Monsieur de Savigny, with whom she was obliged to 
live, if they did not come from V. they would not know her—and 
perhaps not even if they did. 

“Thus did I reply, as I trotted along, to the first questions 
which suggested themselves, and, before I got out of the saddle, 
I had constructed a whole edifice of suppositions, more or less 
plausible, to explain what, to anyone but a reasoner like me, 
would have been inexplicable. Perhaps the only thing that I 
could not explain well, was that the wonderful beauty of Haute- 
claire had not been an obstacle to her entering the service of the 
Comtesse de Savigny, who loved her husband, and might there- 
fore be jealous. But the patrician ladies of V., quite as proud 
as the wives of Charlemagne’s paladins, could not suppose (a grave 
mistake, but they had never read Le Mariage de Figaro) that the 
prettiest lady’s maid could be for their husbands any more than 
the handsomest lackey was to them—and so I ended by saying 
to myself, as I took my foot out of the stirrup, that the Comtesse 


100 THE DIABOLIQUES 


de Savigny had every reason to believe that she was loved, and 
that rascal Savigny was quite capable of keeping up the illusion.” 

“Hum!” I said sceptically—for I could not keep from interrupt- 
ing—“all that is very fine, my dear Doctor, but the situation 
was a terribly imprudent one all the same.” 

“Certainly!” replied this experienced student of human nature; 
“but suppose the imprudence made the situation? There are 
some passions which are only excited by imprudence, and without 
the dangers they provoke they would never exist. In the six- 
teenth century, which was about as passionate an age as could 
be, the most prolific cause of love was the danger of love. A 
man stood a chance of being poniarded as he left the arms of his 
mistress, or a husband put poison in his wife’s sleeve, which you 
kissed and made a fool of yourself over in all the usual ways; and 
so far from putting a stop to love, this incessant danger only 
rendered it the more irresistible. In our tame modern customs, 
where the law has replaced passion, it is evident that the article 
of the Code which applies to the husband who is capable of hav- 
ing—as the law coarsely puts it—‘introduced a concubine into 
the conjugal domicile,’ is an ignoble danger enough, but for noble 
natures this danger seems all the more grand, and Savigny, in 
exposing himself to it, perhaps found the only anxious pleasure 
which really intoxicates strong minds. 

“The next day, as you may imagine,” continued Doctor Torty, 
“I was at the chateau early, but neither that day nor the following 
ones did I see anything but what was absolutely normal and regu- 
lar. Neither on the part of the invalid, nor on that of the Comte, 
nor even on that of the false Eulalie, who performed her duties 
as naturally as though she had been brought up to them, did I 
remark anything which could give me information concerning the 
secret I had surprised. What was certain was that the Comte 
de Savigny and Hauteclaire Stassin were playing the most 
abominably impudent comedy with all the ease of consummate 
actors, and that they had agreed together to play it. But that 
of which I was not so certain, and which I wanted to know first, 


HAPPINESS IN CRIME . IOI 


was whether the Comtesse was really their dupe, and, in case 
she were, whether it were possible that she should long be so. 

“It was upon the Comtesse, therefore, that I concentrated my 
attention. I had no trouble in seeing her, as she was my patient, 
and therefore, on account of her illness, the focus of my observa- 
tions. She was, as I have told you, a true lady of V., knowing 
nothing but this—that she was noble, and that outside the nobility 
there was nothing worthy of regard. The appreciation of their 
nobility is the only passion of the women of V., of the upper 
class—and of all classes that have not deep passions. Mademoi- 
selle Delphine de Cantor had been educated by the Benedictine 
nuns, and, not being at all inclined to religion, had been horribly 
bored, and had left the nunnery to bore herself still more at home 
until she married the Comte de Savigny, whom she loved, or 
thought she loved, with all the readiness of young girls who are 
bored to love the first comer presented to them. 

“She was one of those pale women with soft flesh but hard 
bones, of the colour of milk with which bran has been mixed; 
for the little freckles which covered her skin were certainly darker 
than her hair, which was a very pale gold. When she stretched 
out her white arm, veined with opalescent blue, and a small aris- 
tocratic wrist, in which the pulse was normally languid, she gave 
me the idea that she had been created specially to become a 
victim—to be crushed under the feet of the haughty Hauteclaire, 
who had bowed herself before her to the extent of becoming her 
servant. 

“But this idea, which arose the first moment you looked at her, 
was contradicted by the chin which finished off this thin face—a 
chin like that of Fulvia on the Roman medals, out of place 
amongst ordinary features—and also by a forehead obstinately 
projecting under her colourless hair. It was a puzzle to express 
an opinion about her; but, at any rate, it was impossible that the 
present situation could last long without an explosion. With a 
view to that future explosion, I set to work to sound this little 
woman, who could not long remain a secret to her doctor. He 


102 THE DIABOLIQUES 


who confesses the body, soon holds the heart. If there were moral 
or immoral causes for the actual sufferings of the Comtesse, she 
might try to conceal her impressions and thoughts, but she would 
have at last to reveal them. 

“That is what I said to myself; but I turned and re-turned 
my medical screws in vain. It was evident to me, after some 
days, that she had not the least suspicion of the complicity of her 
husband and Hauteclaire in the domestic crime of which the house 
was the silent and desired theatre. Was it want of sagacity on 
her part? or the dumbness of jealousy? With the false Eulalie 
who waited on her, she was imperious but gentle. That sounds 
contradictory, but it is not—it is true. She gave her orders 
briefly, but she never raised her voice, like a woman who was 
made to be obeyed, and is sure of being obeyed—and she was, 
admirably. Eulalie slipped noiselessly about the room, and her 
attentions stopped just short of the point at which they would 
have become tiresome, and everything was done with a readiness 
and a knowledge of the character of her mistress which showed 
goodwill and intelligence. 

“I even went so far as to speak to the Comtesse about Eulalie, 
who was always near her when I paid my visits, and the sight 
of whom gave me a chill up my back—as though I had seen a 
serpent stealthily approaching a sleeping woman. One day when 
the Comtesse had sent her to fetch something or other, and she 
had stolen out of the room noiselessly, I took advantage of the 
opportunity to ask a question which might give me some light on 
the matter. 

“What a velvety footfall? I said, as I watched her leave. 
‘You have a maid, Madame, who does her work well. May I 
ask where you found her? Does she come from V.? 

““Yes, she serves me very well,’ replied the Comtesse with indif- 
ference, looking at herself in a little hand-mirror framed in green 
velvet and surrounded by peacock’s feathers, and speaking in 
that impertinent tone which was a proof that she took no interest 


in the subject. ‘I am highly satisfied with her. She did not 


HAPPINESS IN CRIME 103 


come from V., but I could not tell you where she does come from 
—I know nothing about her. Ask Monsieur de Savigny if you 
want to know, Doctor, for he brought her to me soon after we 
were married. She had been in the service, he told me, of an 
old lady, a cousin of his, who had died, and she could not find 
another place. I trusted in him, and I was not disappointed. She 
is perfect as a lady’s maid. I do not believe she has a single 
fault.’ 

“I know of one,’ I said with affected gravity. 

“Ah! what is that?’ she replied languidly, without any interest 
in what she was saying, and still attentively studying her pale lips 
in the little hand-mirror. 

“She is pretty,’ I said; ‘she is really much too pretty to be 
a lady’s maid. One of these days you will have someone run 
away with her.’ | 

““Do you think so? she replied, still looking at herself, and 
utterly indifferent to what I said. 

““And perhaps it will be a man of your own station who will 
fall in love with her. She is pretty enough to turn the head of 
a duke.’ 

“I weighed my words before uttering them, for I wanted to 
sound her, and see how much she knew—if she knew nothing, 
I could do no more. 

“There is no duke at V.,’ replied the Comtesse, and her fore- 
head remained as smooth as the glass she held in her hand. ‘Be- 
sides, all women of that sort,’ she added, raising one eyebrow, 
‘leave you when they like to suit their own convenience. Eulalie 
does her work well, but if I showed any affection for her she 
would, no doubt, abuse it, so I do nothing of the sort 

“There was no further mention made of Eulalie that day. The 
Comtesse was completely deceived. Who would not have been, 
for that matter? Even I—though I had seen Hauteclaire so many 
times at only a sword’s length between us, in her father’s fencing- 
school—was almost tempted at times to believe in Eulalie. Sav- 
igny, though he ought to have acted as well as she did, was far less 


104 THE DIABOLIQUES 


at home in this acted lie, but she lived and moved in this atmos- 
phere of deceit as easily and naturally as a fish does in the water. 
She must certainly have been in love, and very deeply in love, to 
do what she did do, and have given up all the advantages of a life 
which flattered her vanity bÿ making her the cynosure of all eyes 
in a little town—for her the whole universe—where sooner or 
later she might have found amongst the young men, her admirers 
and adorers, one who would marry her for love, and take her into 
that good society of which she knew only the men. Her lover 
certainly staked less than she did. His devotion was less than 
hers. His pride, as a man, must have suffered greatly at not 
being able to spare his mistress the indignity of such a humilia- 
ting position. It seemed out of keeping with the impetuous 
character generally ascribed to Savigny. If he loved Hauteclaire 
enough to sacrifice his young wife for her, he might have gone to 
live with her in Italy—that was often done at that time—without 
all the abominations of a shameful and concealed concubinage. 
Was his love less than hers? Did he suffer Hauteclaire to love 
him more than he loved her? Was it she who had broken down 
the guard of the conjugal domicile? And did he, finding the 
experience hazardous and interesting, allow himself to be tempted 
by this new kind of Potiphar’s wife? 

AIT that I could see or hear did not teach me much concern- 
ing Savigny and Hauteclaire. Accomplices in adultery of some 
sort they certainly were—but what was behind that? What was 
the position of these two persons in regard to one another? That 
was a problem I wanted to solve. Savigny’s conduct to his wife 
was irreproachable, but when Hauteclaire-Eulalie was there, I 
could see, out of the corner of my eye, certain precautions which 
denoted that his mind was not at ease. When, in the course of 
my daily visits, he asked for a book or a paper, or some other 
article, he had a way of taking it from the hands of the lady’s 
maid which would have revealed his secret to any other woman 
but this little school-girl, brought up by the Benedictine nuns, 
whom he had married. You could see that he was afraid lest 


HAPPINESS IN CRIME 105 


his hand should touch that of Hauteclaire, as though, if he did 
touch it by chance, he would be obliged to take it. Hauteclaire 
did not display this embarrassment and these precautions. 

“Women are all temptresses, ready to tempt God or the 
Devil, and she seemed pleased to risk desire and danger at the 
same time. 

“Once or twice my visit took place at dinner-time, and Savigny 
always took his dinner by his wife’s bed-side. 

“Hauteclaire waited at table, the other servants never entering 
the Comtesse’s apartment. In order to place the dishes on the 
table, she was obliged to lean over Savigny’s shoulder, and, in 
doing so, her dress touched his neck or ears, and I noticed that 
the Comte turned pale, and glanced at his wife to see if she were 
looking. By Jove! I was young then, and the disturbance of the 
molecules in the organization, which is called the violence of 
emotion, seemed to me the only thing worth living for. I thought 
to myself that it must be strangely delightful to enjoy a mys- 
terious concubinage with a sham servant, under the eyes of an 
abused wife who might guess the truth. 

“But, except for the paleness and the ill-suppressed emotion 
of Savigny, I saw nothing of the tragedy they were playing, and 
the inevitable catastrophe in which it must end. What were they 
doing? I wanted to learn the secret of their romance. The prob- 
lem worried me so much that from observing I took to spying, 
which is only observation at any price. Ah, our tastes soon de- 
prave us. In order to know that of which I was ignorant, I 
allowed myself to commit meannesses which were unworthy and 
which I knew to be so, and yet did them. It is the being accus- 
tomed to sound, my dear fellow. I tried every means. When, 
in my visits to the château, I put my horse in the stable, I ques- 
tioned the servants—without appearing to do so, of course. I 
spied—oh, I won’t spare to use the word—solely for my own 
curiosity. But the servants were all as much deceived as the 
Comtesse. 

“They honestly took Hauteclaire for one of themselves, and 


106 THE DIABOLIQUES 


all my curiosity would have been wasted had it not been for 
chance, which, as usual, did more than all my schemes, and 
taught me more than all my spying. 

“For more than two months I had been attending the Comtesse, 
whose health did not improve, for she showed more and more all 
the symptoms of that debility which is so common now, and 
which the medical men of this enervated age call anemia. Sa- 
vigny and Hauteclaire continued to play with the same consum- 
mate art the difficult comedy which my arrival at the chateau had 
not disconcerted. Nevertheless, it seemed to me that the actors 
were getting tired. Savigny had grown thin, and I heard it said 
at V.: ‘What a good husband Monsieur de Savigny is! He has 
quite changed since his wife’s illness. How nice it must be to be 
loved like that!’ 

“The impassive beauty of Hauteclaire was spoiled by the weary 
look in her eyes—not the look caused by weeping, for she had 
never cried in all her life—but a look as though she had sat up too 
much. The leanness of Savigny, and the wearied eyes, might 
have been due to some other cause than the life they were lead- 
ing. There were many things in that land of subterranean vol- 
canoes which might have caused the symptoms. 

“I had remarked these tell-tale signs on their faces, and had 
asked myself the meaning without being able to give a reply, 
when one day, returning from my rounds, I passed by Savigny. 
My intention had been to call as usual, but a difficult accouche- 
ment had kept me very late, and when I passed the chateau it 
was too late for a visit. JI did not even know what time it was. 
My hunting-watch had stopped. But the moon, which had al- 
ready begun to descend, marked midnight passed on the vast 
dial, and its crescent was below the summits of the fir-trees of 
Savigny, behind which it was about to disappear. 

“Have you ever been to Savigny?” asked the Doctor, breaking 
off his story and turning to me. I nodded. 

“Yes? Well, then you know that you are obliged to pass 


HAPPINESS IN CRIME 107 


through the wood, and along the walls of the chateau, which you 
must double like a cape, in order to get to the high road which 
leads directly to V. Suddenly, in this thick wood, in which you 
could not see a ray of light, nor hear the slightest sound, there 
fell on my ears a noise which I took to be that of beating clothes 
—some poor woman, I thought, who was occupied all day in the 
fields, had taken advantage of the moonlight to wash her clothes 
at some tank or ditch. It was only as I neared the chateau that 
with these regular beats there mingled another sound which en- 
lightened me as to the nature of the first. It was the clashing of 
crossed swords. You know how plainly you can hear in the night, 
when the least sounds become distinct, and there was no mistake 
about its being the sound of iron on iron. An idea crossed my 
mind, and when I emerged from the pine wood before the chateau, 
which was bathed in the moonlight, and one of the windows of 
which was open, I said: 

““Flallo! so that is their way of making love!’ 

“It was evident that Savigny and Hauteclaire were fencing, at 
that hour of the night. I could hear the foils as plainly as though 
I had seen them. What I had taken for the noise of beating 
clothes was the stamping of the feet, or appels, of the fencers. 
The open window was in the pavilion which, of all the four, was 
the farthest removed from the chamber of the Comtesse. ‘The 
sleeping chateau, white and gloomy in the moonlight, looked dead. 
All the rest of the house was dark, but in this one room the Vene- 
tian shutters had been closed, and through them streaks of light 
came, and it was from this room that the noise of the clashing of 
foils proceeded. As the night was warm—it was in July—they 
had opened the window, which led on to the balcony. 

“I had drawn up my horse at the edge of the wood, to listen to 
their combat, which appeared to be a lively one, and I was in- 
terested in this assault at arms between lovers who had first loved 
with weapons in their hands, and who continued to love one an- 
other after the click of the foils had ceased. 


108 THE DIABOLIQUES 


“The blinds were pushed to one side, and I had only just time 
to back my horse into the shadow of the trees, when Savigny 
and Hauteclaire came out and leaned over the iron rail of the 
balcony. I could see them wonderfully well. The moon had 
fallen below the wood, but the light of a candelabrum that I 
could see in the room behind them, showed up their figures. 
Hauteclaire was dressed—if it may be called dressed—as I had 
seen her often when giving her lessons at V., in a leather jacket, 
like a cuirass, and her legs, in the tightly fitting silk hose, showed 
all their muscular beauty. Savigny wore an almost similar cos- 
tume. Both were lithe and robust, and they looked, in the lighted 
square of the window, like two beautiful statues of Youth and 
Strength. You have just admired, in this garden, the proud 
beauty of both, which time has not yet destroyed. Well, that 
will help to give you an idea of the magnificent couple I perceived 
on the balcony, their tightly fitting clothes making them appear 
bare. They were leaning on the balcony and talking, but so low 
that I could not hear what they said, but their attitude told me 
enough. Savigny had thrown one arm round that Amazonian 
waist, which seemed well fitted to resist—but did nothing of the 
kind. 

“And at the same instant the proud Hauteclaire threw her 
arms round Savigny’s neck, and they thus formed the celebrated 
and voluptuous group by Canova, which everyone recollects, and 
thus they remained mouth to mouth long enough to drink a whole 
bottleful of kisses. ‘That lasted for quite sixty beats of my pulse, 
which went faster than at present, and which this sight caused 
to beat even faster still. 

“Oh! oh! I said to myself when they had returned into the 
room and closed the heavy curtains, and I had emerged from my 
hiding-place. ‘One of these days they will have to confide in 
me. It will not be only themselves they will have to hide! 
From the sight of their caresses, and this familiarity, I deduced, 
as a doctor would, the consequences. But their ardour defeated 
my prophecy. You know that there are persons who love too 


HAPPINESS IN CRIME 109 


much”—the cynical old doctor used another word—“and conse- 
quently never have any children. 

“The next morning I went to Savigny. I found Hauteclaire, 
now become Eulalie again, seated in the embrasure of one of the 
windows of the long corridor which led to her mistress’s room, 
with a quantity of linen and other stuff before her, and which she 
was engaged in cutting and mending—she, the fencer of the pre- 
vious night. Could anyone suspect it? I thought, as I noticed 
that graceful form which I had seen almost bare the previous 
night, and which not even the petticoat and the white apron could 
altogether hide. 

“I passed her without speaking, for I spoke to her as little as 
possible, not wishing to seem to know what I did know, and which 
might have been remarked in my voice or look. I felt that I was 
not such an actor as she was, and I distrusted myself. 

“Generally when I passed along this corridor, where she was 
always at work when she was not attending to the Comtesse, she 
heard me coming, and was so certain as to who it was that she 
never raised her head, which remained bowed under the starched 
cap, or the Norman head-dress she sometimes wore, and which 
resembled that of Isabella of Bavaria—and with her eyes bent on 
her work, and her cheeks hidden by the blue-black corkscrew 
curls which framed her pale oval face, she offered to my gaze only 
a gracefully curved neck, covered by thick curls. In Hauteclaire, 
it was the animal which was paramount. No other woman had 
the same kind of beauty. Men—who say everything when alone 
together—had often remarked it, At V., when she gave her 
fencing-lessons, the men used to call her, between themselves, 
Mademoiselle Esau. The Devil teaches women what they are 
—or they would teach it to the Devil if he did not know. 

“Hauteclaire, though not much of a coquette, had a habit, when 
she was listening to anyone, of rolling round her fingers the long 
curls which adorned her neck, and which had rebelled against the 
comb that smoothed her chignon. One of these curls was sufh- 
cient to trouble a man’s spirit, as the Bible says. She knew well 


110 THE DIABOLIQUES 


the effect they caused. But now that she was a lady’s maid, I 
had never once seen her indulge in this gesture, even when look- 
ing at Savigny. 

“My parenthesis has been rather long, my dear fellow, but any- 
thing which enables you to understand Hauteclaire Stassin 1s 
of importance to my story. On that day she was obliged to rise 
and show her face, for the Comtesse rang and ordered her to 
bring me pen and paper, which I needed to write out a prescrip- 
tion. She came, with a steel thimble still on her finger, for she 
had not had time to take it off, and she had stuck the threaded 
needle in her tempting breast, where there were already many 
others. Even these steel needles suited this confounded girl, 
who was made for steel, and in the Middle Ages would have worn 
a cuirass. 

“When I had finished, I raised my eyes and looked at her, and 
saw in her face marks of the fatigue of the previous night. 

“Savigny, who was not there when I arrived, suddenly ap- 
peared. He looked much more fatigued than she did. He spoke 
to me about the health of the Comtesse, who was no better. He 
seemed impatient and annoyed that this was so. His tone was 
bitter and violent. He walked to and fro as he spoke. I looked 
at him coolly, thinking that this Napoleonic tone was rather too 
much. ‘But if I should cure your wife,’ I thought to myself, 
‘you would not be able to practise fencing and—love-making— 
all night with your mistress,’ I could have recalled him to the 
reality and politeness which he had forgotten, by putting under 
his nose—if I had so liked—the smelling-salts of a sharp reply. 
I contented myself with looking at him. He was more interesting 
to me than ever, for it was evident that he was acting a part more 
than ever.” 

The Doctor stopped again. He plunged his big finger and 
thumb into his silver snuff-box, and took a pinch of rappee. He, 
in his turn, appeared so interesting to me that I made no observa- 
tion, and he continued his story, after having taken his pinch and 
passed his bent finger over his hooky nose. 


HAPPINESS IN CRIME III 


“Oh, he was really impatient—but it was not because the wife 
to whom he was so persistently faithless, did not get well. Con- 
found it! a man who made a concubine of his servant in his own 
house, could scarcely be angry that his wife was not cured of an 
illness. If she had been cured, would not his adultery have been 
more difficult? 

“Did he imagine it would not be such a long affair? And, as 
I have since thought, the idea of ending it came to him, or her, 
or both of them—since neither the disease nor the doctor would 
finish—perhaps, at that moment.” 

“What, Doctor! Then they 

I did not finish my sentence: the idea that the Doctor had sug- 
gested cut short my words. 

He bent his head and looked at me as tragically as the statue 
of the Commander when he accepts the supper. 

“Yes!” he said slowly in a low voice, in answer to my thought. 
“At least, some days later, everybody heard with horror that the 
Comtesse had been poisoned, and was dead.” 

“Poisoned!” I cried. 

“By her lady’s maid, Eulalie, who had mistaken one bottle for 
another, and given her mistress some copying-ink instead of a 
medicine I had prescribed. After all, such a mistake was possible. 
But I knew that Eulalie was Hauteclaire. I had seen them both 
forming Canova’s group on the balcony. Society had not seen 
what I had seen. Society was at first under the impression that 
a terrible accident had occurred. But when—two years after this 
catastrophe—they learned that Comte Serlon de Savigny had 
publicly married Stassin’s daughter—for the secret had to come 
out as to who the sham Eulalie was—and that she occupied the 
hardly cold bed of the Comte’s first wife, Mademoiselle Delphine 
de Cantor, oh, then no end of suspicions were muttered, as though 
people were afraid to say what they thought. But, in reality, 
no one knew. They knew about his marriage, which caused the 
Comte de Savigny to be pointed at and shunned as though he had 
the pest. That was quite enough, though. You know what a 


9 





112 THE DIABOLIQUES 


disgrace it is—or rather it was—for things have much changed 
in that district—to say of aman: ‘He has married his servant!’ 
That disgrace rested on him like a stain. As to the horrible ru- 
mours of a suspected crime, they were buzzed about, and died 
away. But there was one person, however, who knew and was 
sure.” 

“And that must have been you, Doctor!” I interrupted. 

“It was I, as a matter of fact,” he continued, “but not I only. 
If I alone had known it, I should never have had but vague 
glimmerings of the truth that would have been worse than ignor- 
ance. I should never have been certain, and,” he said, laying 
the stress of absolute certainty on each word, “J am! 

“And listen to how it is that I am!” he added, pressing my 
knee between his bony fingers. But his story “nipped” me even 
more than the crablike claws of his strong hand. 

“You may well suppose,” he continued, “that I was the first to 
hear that the Comtesse had been poisoned. Whether they were 
guilty or not, they were obliged to send for the family doctor. 
They did not stop to have a horse saddled. A groom came at 
full gallop on a bare-backed horse to me at V. and I followed him 
at the same pace to Savigny. When I arrived—had that been cal- 
culated?—it was not possible to counteract the effects of the 
poison. Serlon, his face grief-stricken, met me in the court-yard, 
and, as I got out of the saddle, said, as though he were frightened 
at his own words: 

“À servant made a mistake.’ (He took care not to say Eulalie, 
whom everybody named next day.) ‘But, Doctor, can it be pos- 
sible that copying-ink is a poison? 

{That depends entirely on what it is made of,’ I replied. 

“He took me to the Comtesse, who was worn out with pain, 
and whose contracted face resembled a ball of white thread that 
had fallen into some green dye. 

“She looked awful. She smiled at me horribly with her black 
lips, and with that kind of smile which seems to say to a man: 
‘I know well what you think.’ I glanced quickly round the room 


HAPPINESS IN CRIME 113 


to see if Eulalie was there. I should have liked to see her face 
at that moment. She was not there. 

“Brave as sfre was, was she afraid of me? Ah, at that time, I 
was—certain. 

“The Comtesse made an effort when she saw me, and raised 
herself on her elbow. 

““Ah, there you are, Doctor,’ she said; ‘but you come too late. 
I am dying. It is not the doctor you should have sent for, Ser- 
lon, but the priest. Send for him at once, and leave me alone for 
two minutes with the Doctor. I wish it.’ 

“She said that ‘I wish it’ as I had never heard her speak be- 
fore—but like a woman who had that chin and forehead I have 
mentioned. 

““Even me?’ said Savigny, feebly. 

“‘Even you,’ she replied. And she added almost caressingly: 
‘You know, my dear, that women are sometimes too modest to 
speak before those they love.’ 

“Hardly had he left than a terrible change came over her. 
From mild she became ferocious. 

““Doctor,’ she said in a voice that teemed with hate, “my 
death is not an accident, it is a crime! Serlon loves Eulalie, and 
she has poisoned me. I did not heed you when you told me 
that girl was too pretty to be a lady’s maid. I was wrong. He 
loves that wretched, that abominable woman, who has killed me. 
He is more guilty than she is, for he loves her, and has deceived 
me for her sake. For some days past, the looks they exchanged 
across my bed have warned me. And then the horrible taste of 
that ink with which they poisoned me. But I drank it all to the 
last drop, in spite of the horrible taste, because I was glad to die. 
Don’t talk about antidotes. I want none of your remedies. I 
wish to die.’ 

“Then why did you send for me, Madame la Comtesse?’ 

“Well, this is why,’ she replied breathlessly. “To tell you that 
they have poisoned me, and that you should give me your word 
of honour to keep the secret. It would make a terrible scandal. 


114 THE DIABOLIQUES 


That must not be. You are my doctor, and people will believe 
you when you speak of this mistake they have invented—when 
you say that I should not have died, but might have been saved, 
if my health had not been so bad for a long time past. That is 
what you must swear, Doctor.’ 

“As I did not reply, she saw what was passing in my mind. 
I thought she loved her husband to such an extent that she wished 
to save him. That was the idea that occurred to my mind—a 
natural and vulgar idea, for there are some women so intended 
for love and all its self-denials, that they would not return the 
blow that killed them. But the Comtesse de Savigny had never 
appeared to me to be a woman of that sort. 

““Oh, it is not what you imagine that makes me ask you to 
swear that, Doctor. Oh, no! I hate Serlon so at this moment 
that I could never love him again. But I am not such a coward 
as to forgive him. I shall leave this life jealous of him and im- 
placable. But this does not concern Serlon, Doctor,’ she con- 
tinued with energy, showing me a side of her character of which 
I had already caught a glimpse, but the depths of which I had 
not penetrated. ‘It concerns the Comte de Savigny. I do not 
want it to be known, when I am dead, that the Comte de Savigny 
murdered his wife. I do not want him tried at the assizes, and 
accused of complicity with a servant who is an adulteress and a 
poisoner. I do not want that stain to rest on the name of Savigny, 
which I bear. Oh, it is not for his sake, for he is worthy of the 
scaffold. I should like to torture him. But it concerns all the 
aristocracy of the country. If we were still what we ought to be, 
I should have thrown Eulalie into one of the dungeons of the 
chateau of Savigny, and there would have been no more said 
about her. But we are no longer masters in our own houses. 
We have no longer our expeditious and silent justice, and on no 
account would I have the scandal and publicity of yours, Doctor; 
and I prefer to leave them in each other’s arms, happy, and freed 
from me, and for me to die as I am dying, than to think when I 


HAPPINESS IN CRIME 115 


am dying that the nobility of V. should have the disgrace of count- 
ing a poisoner in its ranks.’ 

“She spoke with unaccustomed clearness, although her jaws 
chattered as though her teeth would break. It was the aristocrat 
that was stronger in her than the jealous wife. She would die 
as befitted a daughter of V., the last aristocratic town in France. 
And, touched by that—perhaps more than I ought to have been 
—I promised and swore to do what she asked. 

“And I have done so, my dear fellow. I did not save her. 

“I could not save her; she obstinately refused to take any rem- 
edy. 

“T said what she wished me to when she was dead, and I was 
believed. 

“That is fully twenty-five years ago. At present everything 
concerning the affair is silent and forgotten. Most of her con- 
temporaries are dead. Other generations—ignorant or indifferent 
—are drifting towards their tombs, and the first account of this 
story that I have ever given is to you. 

“And if it had not been for what we have seen, I should not 
have told you now. It needed those two beings, unchangeably 
beautiful in spite of time, unchangeably happy in spite of their 
crime, powerful, passionate, absorbed in each other, passing 
through life as they did through this garden, like two angels united 
in the golden shadow of their four wings.” 

I was amazed. “But,” I said, “if what you tell me is true, the 
happiness of these people is a terrible disorder of nature.” 

“It is disorder, or it is order, whichever you please,” replied 
Doctor Torty, a confirmed atheist, and as quiet in mind as the 
persons of whom he was speaking, “but it is a fact. They are ex- 
ceptionally happy; insolently happy. I am an old man, and I 
have seen, in the course of my life, much happiness which did not 
endure, but I have never seen but that one which was so profound 
and yet lasted for ever. 

“And yet you may believe that I have well studied and scrutin- 


116 THE DIABOLIQUES 


ized it. I have sought for a rift in their happiness. If you will 
excuse the expression, I may say that I have loused it. I have 
searched the life of those two beings to see if there was not, in 
their astonishing and revolting happiness, a fault or crack how- 
ever small, in some secret place, but I have never found anything 
but an excellent and successful joke of the Devil’s against God, 
if there be a God or a Devil. 

“After the death of the Comtesse, I remained, as you may 
imagine, on good terms with Savigny. As I had lent the weight 
of my authority to the fable they had devised to explain the pois- 
oning, they had no interest in putting me on one side, and I had a 
great interest in knowing what would follow, what they would do, 
and what would become of them. What followed was the period 
of mourning of Savigny, which lasted the customary two years, 
and which Savigny performed in a manner to confirm the public 
idea that he was the most excellent of husbands, past, present, or 
future. 

“During these two years, he saw absolutely no one, but buried 
himself in his chateau in such solitude that no one knew that he 
had kept at Savigny, Eulalie, the involuntary cause of the death 
of the Comtesse, and whom he ought in common decency to have 
got rid of, even if he had known she was innocent. 

“The imprudence of keeping in his house such a woman after 
such a catastrophe, showed the senseless passion that I had al- 
ways suspected in Serlon. Therefore I was not at all surprised 
when one day, on returning from my rounds, I met one of the 
servants on the road near Savigny, and on asking what was going 
on at the chateau was told that Eulalie was still there. By the 
indifferent tone in which he said that, I saw that none of the 
Comte’s servants suspected that Eulalie was his mistress. “They 
are playing a close game,’ .I said to myself. ‘But why do they 
not leave the country? The Comte is rich. He could live in 
good style anywhere. Why not run away with this beautiful 
she-devil (in the way of she-devil, I do believe in that one) who, 
in order that she might hook him the better, preferred to live in 


HAPPINESS IN CRIME 117 


her lover’s house, in spite of the danger, than to be his mistress at 
V., in some quiet lodging where he could come and see her se- 
cretly:? There was something underneath all this I could not 
understand. Their infatuation, their devotion to each other, 
was then so great that they forgot all prudence and precaution? 
Hauteclaire, whom I supposed to have a stronger character than 
Serlon, and to be the man of the couple—did she intend to remain 
in the château where she had been a servant, and where she 
might become mistress, and, if that caused any scandal, prepare 
public opinion for a yet greater scandal—her marriage with the 
Comte de Savigny? ‘That idea had not occurred to me, if it had 
occurred to her at that period of my story. Hauteclaire Stassin, 
the daughter of'the fencing-master, ‘Old Straight-thrust,’ whom we 
had all seen giving lessons at V., Comtesse de Savigny! Impos- 
sible! The world would come to an end! For my own part, I 
believed that the concubinage between these two fierce animals, 
who had recognized at the first glance that they were of the same 
species, and had dared to commit adultery under the eyes of the 
Comtesse, would still continue. 

“But a marriage impudently accomplished in the face of God 
and man—a challenge and defiance to outraged public opinion— 
I was, upon my word, a thousand miles from imagining such a 
thing, and when, after the two years’ mourning, the event oc- 
curred, I was quite as much surprised as any of those fools who 
never expect anything, and who howl like a whipped dog when the 
unexpected does occur. 

“Moreover, during those two years of mourning which Serlon 
observed so strictly, and which—when people saw what the end 
was—caused him to be so furiously taxed with hypocrisy and 
baseness, I did not go much to Savigny. What should I do there? 
They were both in good health, and until the moment, perhaps not 
so far off, when they would send for me in the night for an ac- 
couchement (which would require concealing also), they had no 
need of my services. Nevertheless, I now and then paid a visit to 
the Comte, Politeness mingled with curiosity. Serlon received 


118 THE DIABOLIQUES 


me wherever he might be when I arrived. He did not show the 
least embarrassment. His kind manner had returned. He was 
grave. I have remarked that happy people are grave. They 
carry their heart like a full glass, that the least movement might 
cause to overflow or break. In spite of his gravity and his black 
clothes, there was in Serlon’s eyes an unmistakable expression of 
immense happiness. It was no longer an expression of relief and 
deliverance, as on the day when he saw that I had recognized 
Hauteclaire but had determined not to recognize her. No, par- 
bleu! it was really and truly happiness. Although in these cere- 
monious and short visits we talked only about superficial matters, 
his voice was not as it had been in the time of his wife. Its in- 
tonation seemed to show that he was obliged to restrain the senti- 
ments he really felt. 

“As for Hauteclaire (still Eulalie, and at the chateau, as the 
servant had told me), it was a long time before I met her. I no 
longer passed her in the corridor, working in the window-seat, as 
in the days of the Comtesse. And yet the pile of linen in the 
same place, and the scissors, work-box, and thimble on the 
window-sill showed that she must work there, on that chair empty 
now, and perhaps warm, which she perhaps had left when she 
heard me coming. You will remember that I was conceited 
enough to believe that she was afraid to meet my eye, but at 
present she had nothing to fear. She was not aware that the 
Comtesse had related that terrible secret to me. Such was her 
bold, proud nature that she would have braved anyone sagacious 
enough to divine her secret. And, in fact, when I did see her, her 
happiness was written on her face in such a radiant manner that 
you could not have effaced it if you had poured over it all the 
bottle of copying-ink with which she had poisoned the Comtesse. 

“It was on the grand staircase of the chateau that I met her 
the first time. She was coming down as I was going up. She 
was gliding along rather quickly, but when she saw me she went 
more slowly, no doubt with the intention of showing me her face 
and looking me full in the eyes—but if she could make the pan- 


HAPPINESS IN CRIME 119 


ther close its eyes, she could not make me close mine. As she 
came down the staircase, her skirt floated behind her, owing to 
her rapid movement, and she seemed to have descended from 
heaven. She had a sublimely happy air. It was fifteen thousand 
leagues above that of Serlon. I passed her, nevertheless, without 
any signs of politeness, for if Louis XIV saluted the maidservants 
when he met them on the stairs, at least they were not poisoners. 
She was still dressed as a lady’s maid, with a white apron; but 
the happy appearance of the triumphant and despotic mistress 
had replaced the impassiveness of the slave. That air she has 
never lost. You have seen her and can judge. It is more strik- 
ing even than the beauty of the face upon which it shines. That 
superhuman air of pride in happy love, she has been able to 
bestow upon Serlon, who did not have it at first; and she con- 
tinues after twenty years to have it still, and I have never seen 
it diminished or veiled for an instant on the faces of these two 
privileged beings. By that air they have always been able to 
reply victoriously to neglect, slander, or outraged public opinion, 
and it has caused all those who have met them to believe that 
the crime of which they were suspected for a short time, was an 
atrocious calumny.” 

“But you, Doctor,” I interrupted, “after all that you know, you 
are not imposed upon by that appearance? You have followed 
them about everywhere, have you not? You have seen them at 
all sorts of times?” 

“Except in their bedroom at night, and it is not there that they 
would lose it,” replied Doctor Torty, jokingly, but wisely, “I have 
seen them, I believe, at all times of their life since their marriage 
—which took place I know not where, in order not to face the 
rough music which the populace of V., quite as furious in its 
own way as the nobility in theirs, had promised to give them. 
When they returned home married, and she was properly and 
authentically the Comtesse de Savigny, and he absolutely dis- 
graced by marriage with his servant, they settled down in their 
chateau at Savigny. People turned their backs on them, but 


120 THE DIABOLIQUES 


they did not care. But they have never wearied of each other; 
even now their passion is not appeased. As a doctor, I do not 
wish to die before I have written a treatise on teratology, and 
as they interest me—as strange monsters—I have not followed 
those who avoid them. When I saw the sham Eulalie completely 
a countess, she received me as though she had been one all her 
life. She was well aware that I remembered the white apron 
and the silver platter. 

“<T am no longer Eulalie,’ she said. ‘I am Hauteclaire, happy 
to have been a servant for his sake.’ 

“I thought she had been something else as well; but as I was 
the only person in the district who went to Savigny when they 
returned there, I swallowed my pride, and ended by going there 
often. I may say that I continued to strive to pierce the intimacy 
of these two beings, so completely happy in their love. Well, you 
may believe me or not, as you like, my dear fellow, but I have 
never seen the purity of that happiness (though I was sure it 
was stained by a crime), I will not say dulled, not even shadowed 
for a single minute in a single day. The stain of a cowardly 
crime, which had not the courage to be a bloody one, had never 
sullied the blue horizon of their happiness once, so far as I can 
see. That is enough to knock over—is it not?—all the moralists 
on earth, who have invented the fine theory about vice punished 
and virtue rewarded. 

“Neglected and solitary as they were, and seeing no one but 
me, for whom they did not put themselves out of the way, I being 
a doctor who was almost a friend, by dint of familiarity they 
ceased to be on their guard. They forgot me, and lived, when I 
was present, in the intoxication of a passion to which I have 
seen nothing to compare in all my life. You were the witness of 
it a moment ago. They passed, and they did not even perceive 
me, although I was at their elbow. A good part of the time I 
spent with them, they never saw me either. Polite and amiable, 
but often absent-minded, their behaviour to me was such that I 
should never have returned to Savigny if I had not wanted to 


HAPPINESS IN CRIME 121 


study microscopically their incredible happiness, and to discover, 
for my personal edification, the grain of weariness, of suffering, 
or—if I must speak plainly—of remorse. But there was nothing! 
—nothing! Love pervaded everything, and obscured their moral 
sense and what you call conscience, and when I looked at these 
happy beings, I understood the seriousness of the joke of my old 
comrade Broussais when he said about conscience: ‘I have been 
dissecting for thirty years and have never found a trace of that 
little beast.’ 

“And do not imagine,” continued the sarcastic old doctor, as 
though he had read my thoughts, “that what I am telling you is 
a mere theory—the proof of the doctrine which denies the exist- 
ence of conscience as Broussais denied it, I believe to be true. 
There is no theory here. I do not pretend to ask your opinion. 
I relate nothing but facts, which astonished me as much as they 
do you. It is merely the phenomenon of continued happiness— 
of a soap-bubble which increased in size and never burst. When 
happiness lasts like that, it is always surprising, but happiness in 
crime is astounding, and in twenty years I have never got over 
my amazement. The old doctor, the old observer, the old moral- 
ist—or immoralist (he added, seeing me smile)—is disconcerted 
by this spectacle which he has beheld so many years, and which 
he cannot relate in detail, for, as is well said, happiness has no 
history. 

“No description is possible. You can no more paint happiness 
—that infusion of a higher life into ordinary life—than you can 
paint the circulation of blood in the veins. You can certify by 
the beating of the arteries that it does circulate; and, by the same 
reasoning, I can certify to the happiness of those incomprehensible 
beings, whose pulse I have been feeling for so many years. The 
Comte and Comtesse de Savigny, without knowing it, re-create 
every day that splendid chapter of “Love in Marriage” of 
Madame de Staél, or the still more magnificent verses of Milton’s 
Paradise Lost. For my own part, I have never been very senti- 
mental or very poetical, but the ideal which they have realized, 


122 THE DIABOLIQUES 


and which I deemed impossible, has disgusted me with the best 
marriages I have known, and which the world called charming. 
I have always found these so inferior to theirs—so colourless 
and cold. Destiny, or their star, or chance—whatever it may be 
—has decreed that they shall live for themselves alone. Being 
rich, they have that idleness without which love cannot exist, but 
which often kills the love from which it necessarily springs. But 
their case is an exception, and idleness has not killed theirs. 
Love, which simplifies everything, has made their life a sublime 
simplification. There are none of those important matters which 
are called events in the existence of those two married people, 
who have lived, apparently, like most rich people, far from a 
world of which they ask nothing, caring nothing for its esteem or 
its disdain. 

“They have never left one another. Where one goes, the 
other goes. The roads round V. again saw Hauteclaire on horse- 
back, as in the time of ‘Old Straight-thrust’; but it was the Comte 
de Savigny who was with her, and the ladies of the district, when 
they passed in their carriages, now stared at her more, perhaps, 
than when she was the tall and mysterious young girl in the dark- 
blue veil, whom they could not see. Now she had raised her 
veil, and boldly showed the face of the servant who had known 
how to make a good match, and the ladies returned home indig- 
nant, but thoughtful. 

“The Comte and Countess de Savigny never travel; they some- 
times come to Paris, but they stay only a few days. Their 
life is concentrated entirely in the chateau of Savigny, which 
was the theatre of a crime, of which they have perhaps forgotten 
the memory in the bottomless abyss of their hearts.” 

“Have they never had any children, Doctor?” I asked. 

“Ah!” said Doctor Torty, “you fancy, perhaps, that that is 
their curse—the revenge of Fate—what you call the vengeance 
or the justice of God! No, they have never had any children. 
I once thought they would never have any. They love one an- 


HAPPINESS IN CRIME 123 


other too much. The fire which devours, consumes and does 
not produce. One day I said to Hauteclaire: 

“‘Are you not sorry not to have any children, Madame la 
Comtesse?” 

“<T do not want any,’ she said proudly. ‘I should love Serlon 
less. Children,’ she added with a kind of scorn, ‘are good only 
for women who are unhappy.’ ” 

And Doctor Torty finished his story abruptly with this re- 
mark, which he deemed profound. 

He had interested me, and I said: 

“Criminal as she may be, I am interested in this woman, 
Hauteclaire. Had it not been for her crime, I should have under- 
stood Serlon’s love.” 

“And, perhaps, even with her crime,” said the Doctor. “As, 


indeed, I do,” he added boldly. 





BENEATH THE CARDS OF 
A GAME OF WHIST 


OE De 


oa 








BENEATH THE CARDS OF A GAME 
OF WHIST 


Cr 


i /elevlt ish au tale 
All sound and fury, signifying—nothing.” 
Macbeth. 


I 


ONE evening last summer I was in the drawing-room of the 
Baronne de Mascranny, one of the most faithful admirers in all 
Paris of the now almost lost art of witty conversation, a lady 
always ready to open her doors wide—though a narrower ingress 
would have amply sufficed—to the few exponents of it still spared 
us. The fact is that in these latter days wit has been entirely 
superseded by a pretentious nondescript called Intelligence. . . . 
The Baronne de Mascranny is, on her husband’s side, of an an- 
cient and illustrious family, originally hailing from the Grisons. 
She bears for arms, as all the world knows: or, three bars wavy 
gules; on a chief gules an eagle displayed argent, dexter a key 
argent, sinister a helmet of the same; the shield charged with an 
escutcheon of pretence azure, bearing a fleur-de-lis or; and this 
chief as well as the devices it bears were augmentations of honour 
that had been granted by more than one European sovereign to 
the family of Mascranny in recompense for services rendered 
them by its members at different periods of history. Nowadays, 
unfortunately, the sovereigns of Europe have quite other matters 
of greater urgency to attend to; else they might do worse than 
add another ornament to a shield, already so nobly filled, in 
recognition of the really heroic pains the Baronne lavishes on the 
expiring art of conversation, that doomed child of aristocratic 
leisure and monarchical absolutism. 
127 


128 THE DIABOLIQUES 


With wit and manners to match her high name the Baronne de 
Mascranny has made her drawing-room into a kind of delectable 
Coblentz, a refuge for the elegant conversation of other days, 
where the expiring glories of French wit have found a home, when 
forced to emigrate by the busy, utilitarian habits of the age. 
There night by night, till it fall silent altogether, it chants its swan- 
song with a divine melodiousness. There, and in the few other 
Parisian houses where the grand traditions of good talk are still 
kept up, pretentious and sententious phrases are eschewed, and 
monologue is a thing almost unheard of. There nothing recalls 
the leading article or the platform speech, those two most common- 
place moulds of thought in the nineteenth century. Wit is content 
to coruscate in sentences that may be, and often are, both brilliant 
and profound, but never long; often a mere intonation of the 
voice suffices, or a trifling gesture, that is a work of genius in itself. 
I owe it to this twice-blessed salon that I have learnt better to 
appreciate a power of which I had hardly suspected the existence 
before, that of the monosyllable. How often have I heard one 
launched, or merely lightly dropped, into the conversation, with a 
skill that far exceeded that of Mademoiselle Mars, the queen of 
monosyllable on the boards. But the Faubourg Saint-Germain 
could have ousted her from her throne with ease, supposing she 
could ever have appeared on that stage; for its denizens possess 
far too much of the “great lady,” when they indulge in refined 
and dainty speech, to “refine refined gold,” like an actress in a 
piece of Marivaux’s. 

Well, on this particular evening, by way of exception, the wind, 
as we shall see, blew from the opposite quarter. When I entered 
the Baronne de Mascranny’s drawing-room, I found a considerable 
number of people assembled there, those she calls her familiars, 
and the conversation as animated as it always was. Like the 
exotics filling the jasper flower-vases on her tables, the Baronne’s 
familiars hail from pretty well all parts of the world. Among them 
are English, Poles, Russians—though all are French in speech and 
by virtue of that quality of mind and manners which is one and 


BENEATH THE CARDS 129 


the same in all countries at a certain level in the social scale. 
I cannot tell what had been the original starting-point; but when 
I entered, they were discussing romance and romances. For them 
to discuss romance meant only that each was busy dissecting his 
or her own life. For it is needless to remark that a gathering 
such as this of men and women of society, did not indulge in the 
pedantry of dragging in the literary aspect of the question. Mat- 
ter, not manner, was what concerned them most; and not one of 
these high-bred moralists, these practical exponents of love and 
life, whose light words and indifferent air hid many a passionate 
experience, but saw in romance mainly a question of human na- 
ture, of history and manners. This seems little, but is it not in 
reality everything? 

Apparently they must already have talked a great deal about the 
subject, for they all had that intense expression which denotes an 
interest long sustained. Under the subtle stimulus of each other’s 
excitement, every temperament was at sparkling-point. Only 
some intense souls—I could count three or four such in the room 
—sat silent, some with drooping head, some with eyes fixed dream- 
ily on the rings of a hand that lay extended on their knee. Per- 
haps they were striving to corporealize their dreams—a task as 
difficult as to spiritualize one’s sensations. Under cover of the 
discussion, I slipped in unperceived behind the dazzling, velvety 
back of the beautiful Comtesse de Damnaglia, who was biting be- 
tween her lips the tip of her closed fan as she listened attentively 
—as all did in this assemblage, where listening is a fine art. The 
day was declining, a day of rosy light now verging into darkness, 
as happy lives do. The company formed a circle, in the twilit 
room, resembling a garland of men and women, posed in various 
attitudes of easy attention. They made a sort of living bracelet 
of which the mistress of the house, with her Egyptian profile and 
the couch which, like Cleopatra, she always occupied, was the cen- 
tral clasp. An open window showed a bit of sky and the balcony 
where some of the guests were standing, and the air was so clear 
and the Quai d’Orsay so profoundly quiet for the moment, that 


130 THE DIABOLIQUES 


these people did not lose one syllable of what the man in the 
room was saying, and this in spite of the Venetian draperies of 
the window that must have deadened a voice less sonorous and 
smothered some of its vibrations in their folds. Directly I rec- 
ognized who the speaker was, I ceased to wonder at the atten- 
tion he commanded—which in this case was no mere piece of po- 
liteness—or at the audacity of anyone’s holding forth at so much 
greater length than was usual in this home of exquisite refinement. 

He was, in fact, the most brilliantly successful talker in this 
kingdom of brilliant talk. I will not give his name—but that is 
his distinctive title! Nay, I have made a mistake: he had another 
equally distinctive. . . . Scandal and calumny, those twin Me- 
nechmi, are so much alike that they cannot well be distinguished, 
and scrawl their budget of ill words backwards, as if they were 
Hebrew (which they are sometimes), wrote in characters of shame 
that he had been the hero of more than one adventure he would 
scarce have cared to tell that night. 

“, .. The finest romances of life,” he was saying, when I set- 
tled myself among the sofa cushions, behind the shelter of the 
Comtesse de Damnaglia’s white shoulders, “are realities one has 
touched with the elbow, or even the foot, in passing. We have 
all of us seen them; romance is commoner than history. I am 
not now speaking of those which were notorious catastrophes, 
dramas staged with the fine audacity of much high-flown senti- 
ment and flaunted in the dignified face of Public Opinion. Quite 
apart from these blazing scandals, which after all are infrequent 
in a society like our own, which yesterday was hypocritical, 
though to-day it is only timid, there is not one amongst us but 
has witnessed those mysterious workings of sentiment or pas- 
sion that blast a whole career to ruin, breaking hearts that give 
out only a dull, dead sound, like a corpse dropped into the hidden 
depths of an oubliette, and over which the world goes on its way, 
many-voiced or merely silent. We may often say of romance 
what Moliére used to say of virtue: ‘Where the deuce will it 


BENEATH THE CARDS 131 


build next?” . . . Where you least expect to find it, lo! there it is. 
In my own person, I saw when a boy—no! saw is not the word !— 
I guessed, I divined, one of those cruel, terrible dramas, that 
are never played out in public, though the public sees the actors 
in them every day—one of those sanguinary comedies, as Pascal 
phrases it, but represented with closed doors, behind a stage-cloth 
—the curtain of privacy and home life. The catastrophe of these 
hidden, stifled tragedies, dramas, if I may use the expression, of 
checked perspiration, is more sinister and produces a more poig- 
nant. effect on the imagination and memory than if the whole ac- 
tion had been unrolled under our very eyes. The unknown mul- 
tiplies the impressiveness of the known a hundredfold. Am I 
right in thinking that hell, of which a glimpse is visible through 
some vent-hole in the earth’s crust, would be far more terrifying 
than if beheld in its entirety in one wide-embracing look?” 

Here he made a slight pause. He had enunciated a proposition 
appealing so directly to the human nature of his audience and so 
convincing to anyone having a touch of imagination, that no one 
dreamed of challenging what he said. Every face depicted the 
liveliest curiosity. Little Sybil, who sat crouched double at the 
foot of the couch where her mother reclined, drew closer to 
the latter with a convulsive shudder of apprehension, as if some- 
one had slipt an adder between her flat undeveloped bosom and 
her frock. 

“Stop him, Mother!” she cried, with the confidence of a spoilt 
child, brought up to be a little despot. “Don’t let him tell us these 
horrid, creepy tales. They make me shiver.” 

“I will not say another word, if you prefer, Sybil,” replied the 
narrator, whom she had designated merely as fim, with a childish, 
almost affectionate familiarity. 

He, living as he did in such close intimacy with the child, knew 
the mingled inquisitiveness and timidity of her excitable nature. 
For she was one of those individuals who at any unexpected inci- 
dent experience the same thrill we feel on plunging our feet sud- 


132 THE DIABOLIQUES 


denly into a bath colder than the surrounding air, that catches 
the breath as the limbs sink deeper in the startling coldness of the 
water. 

“Sybil can claim no right that I know of to impose silence on my 
friends,” put in the Baronne, caressing her daughter’s head, so 
precocious in its pensive gravity. “If she is afraid, she has the re- 
source of the fearful, flight; she can run away.” 

But the capricious girl, who, it may be, was just as curious as her 
mother to hear the story, did not run away, but drew up her little 
body all a-tremble with fearful interest, fixing her dark, dreamy 
eyes on the narrator, as if she were bending shudderingly over an 
abyss. 

“Well, then, tell on!” ordered Mademoiselle Sophie de Revistal, 
turning on him her great brown orbs, so full of light and even yet 
so suffused with limpid moisture, for all the fire that had blazed 
inthem. “Behold!” she added with a theatrical gesture, so slight 
as to be almost imperceptible; “we are all hanging on your lips.” 

Then he proceeded to relate the following strange tale. But 
how can I reproduce, without spoiling half its effect, a narrative 
that owed so much to the subtle emphasis of voice and gesture— 
how make others feel the same vivid impression it produced on an 
audience assembled thus in the sympathetic atmosphere of the 
Baronne’s drawing-room? 

“I was brought up in the country,” he began, fairly embark- 
ing on his narrative, “and passed my boyhood in the home of my 
ancestors. My father lived at a village that stood negligently 
bathing its feet in a river, at the foot of a hill. I will not tell you 
in what part of the country it lay, but it was near a small provin- 
cial town you will recognize when I tell you it is, or rather was in 
those days, the most profoundly, ferociously aristocratic in all 
France. I have never seen anything like it since. Not our own 
Faubourg Saint-Germain, not the Place Bellecour at Lyons, nor 
the three or four other big towns generally quoted for their 
haughty and exclusive spirit of aristocracy, could give a notion of 


‘BENEATH THE CARDS 133 


this little town of six thousand souls, which before 1789 had fifty 
coaches bedizened with armorial bearings rolling proudly over its 
flagstones. 

“It seemed as if the old sentiment, gradually disappearing from 
other parts of the country, which more and more every day was 
being overwhelmed by the encroaching flood of an insolent bour- 
geoisie, had concentrated in tenfold strength there, as at the bot- 
tom of a crucible, giving out like a ruby under fusion a persistent 
brilliancy that is inherent in the very substance of the stone and 
will not vanish till the last atom is destroyed. 

“The nobility of this nest of nobles, who will die to a man (or 
it may be are dead by now) still clinging to these prejudices, 
which for my own part I call sublime social verities, was as inca- 
pable of compromise as God. It knew nothing of what humiliates 
almost all nobilities, the degradation of misalliances. 

“The daughters of these noble houses, ruined as they were by 
the Revolution, would die old maids without a murmur, supported 
in their stoicism by the all-sufficing glory of their armorial bear- 
ings. My youth was fired by the ardent flame of these fair and 
charming personalities, who one and all knew only too well how 
futile their beauty was, and felt instinctively that the rich blood 
beating in their hearts and dyeing their cheeks scarlet, coursed 
so hotly through their arteries in vain. 

“At thirteen I was full of fond dreams of romantic devotion to 
these poor girls, whose whole fortune was the close crown on their 
scutcheon and whose whole life, from its earliest day, was imbued 
with a majestic melancholy, as befits those condemned by fate. 
Outside their own caste, this nobility kept itself undefiled as a 
mountain spring, and would know no one. 

“Would you wish us,’ they would say, ‘would you wish us to 
know these vulgarians, whose fathers handed plates to ours? 

“And they were right; the thing was impossible, for in a town 
of this size it was true. Equalization of ranks is all very well—at 
a distance; but in an area about as big as a pocket-handkerchief, 


134 THE DIABOLIQUES 


races are inevitably divided off by the very fact of their proximity. 
So they visited each other, and no one else whatever, except a few 
English residents. 

“For the English were drawn to the little place, which re- 
minded them of some of their own quiet County-towns. They 
liked it for its silence, its stiff propriety and the chill respect- 
ability of its ways of life, for the close proximity of the sea that 
had brought them thither, no less than for the possibility, due to 
the cheapness of living, of doubling the purchasing power of an in- 
come inadequate to support their position at home. 

“Offspring of the same pirate breed as the Normans, they looked 
upon this little Normandy town as a sort of Continental England, 
and used to take up their residence there for long periods at a 
time. 

“There the young English misses learnt French as they drove 
their hoops under the scraggy lindens in the Place d’Armes; but 
always, as they approached eighteen, they would take flight for 
England, the poor ruined nobility of the place being quite unlikely 
to afford themselves the luxury of marrying girls with the small 
dowry customary in English families. So they would bid fare- 
well to their old haunts, and another immigration would presently 
succeed to their abandoned homes, so that the quiet streets, where 
the grass grows between the stones as it does at Versailles, had 
always much about the same number of fair promenaders with 
green veils and checked frocks and Scotch plaids. Except for this 
temporary residence of English families, lasting on an average 
from seven to ten years, and their comings and goings at long in- 
tervals, nothing broke the monotonous existence of the dull little 
town. The general stagnation and monotony were awful. 

“Enough, and more than enough, abuse has been heaped on 
provincial life for the narrow circle within which it moves; here, 
this life, everywhere so poor in events, was doubly so from the 
fact that all rivalry between class and class, and the social antag- 
onisms and petty vanities it gives rise to, were entirely absent. 
In most small places this is by no means so, and jealousy, dislike, 


BENEATH THE CARDS 135 


wounded self-love, keep up a constant ferment at or below the sur- 
face which now and again breaks out into some startling scandal, 
some ebullition of spite, one of those downright little social villain- 
ies that the law cannot recognize. 

“Here the gulf of demarcation was so deep, the dividing line so 
wide and impassable, separating what was noble from what was 
not, that any struggle between patrician and plebeian was out 
of the question. To make a struggle possible, some common 
meeting-ground and some mutual interests are indispensable, and 
these did not exist. 

“However, the Devil had his due,’ as they say, for all that. 
At the bottom of their hearts, in their inmost thoughts, these good 
bourgeois, whose fathers had handed plates, these sons of gentle- 
men’s gentlemen, now grown rich and independent, were still evil 
cesspools of envy and hatred that not unfrequently would belch out 
their foulness and fury against their better-born neighbours—who 
for their part had simply erased them from their field of vision, 
and paid no more heed to them whatever, now they had ceased to 
wear their livery. 

“Indeed they were oblivious of all these things, securely en- 
trenched within the walls of their family mansions, whose doors 
remained closed against all but their so-called equals; for their life 
ended where another caste began. What matter if their inferiors 
spoke ill of them? . . . They had only to shut their ears. Then 
the younger men, who might have bandied insults and picked a 
quarrel, never met in public places, where the very air is electrical 
with the stimulating presence and bright eyes of women. 

“There was no theatre in the place and no theatrical perform- 
ances, players never coming that way, for lack of a playhouse. 
The cafés, mean and provincial, seldom saw any other customers 
round their billiard tables but some of the most degraded section 
of the bourgeoisie, a few noisy ne’er-do-weels, and half-pay officers, 
worn-out relics of the great wars of the Empire. Yet, angered 
as they were by all these wounds to their sense of equality (a 
feeling capable by itself of fully accounting for the horrors of the 


136 THE DIABOLIQUES 


Revolution), these citizens had retained, in spite of themselves, a 
certain superstitious reverence for rank and birth they had long 
ago formally repudiated. 

“The reverence of the populace is something like the sacred Am- 
pulla of Rheims, on which so much good wit has been wasted. 
When it is all gone, there is still some left. The toy-maker’s son 
declaims against the inequalities of rank; but he would never 
dream of walking alone and in cold blood across the public square 
of his native town, where everybody knows everybody else, and 
has lived in the same street from childhood, in order to insult in 
mere wantonness the son, let us say, of a Clamorgan-Taillefer 
passing by with his sister on his arm. He would have the whole 
town up in arms against him. Like everything else that provokes 
malice and envy, birth exercises over the very people who most 
bitterly reject its claims a physical ascendancy, which is perhaps 
the best proof of its rights. In time of Revolution this ascendancy 
is fiercely combated; it still makes itself felt by virtue of the very 
reaction it provokes. In more peaceable times it acts with a 
steady and persistent, though unacknowledged, force. 

“Well, 182 . . . was one of these periods of tranquillity. . . . 
Liberalism, which was growing steadily under the shadow of the 
Constitutional Charter, as were its champions and watch-dogs in 
their borrowed kennel, had not as yet crushed the life out of that 
sentiment of loyalty which the return of the Princes from exile 
had raised to fever-heat in every heart. Say what you will, it was 
a proud moment for France, convalescent and once more monarchi- 
cal; the knife of successive Revolutions had cut her bosom to the 
quick, but full of hope and energy, she still dreamt she could live 
on thus mutilated, not as yet feeling in her veins the mysterious 
germs of the cancer that had long been gnawing at her vitals and 
must one day kill her. 

“For the little town I am describing it was a time of profound 
and utter quiet. A religious mission, which had just closed, had 
smothered, so far as aristocratic society was concerned, the last 
vestiges of liveliness, stir and youthful amusements. Balls and 


BENEATH THE CARDS 157, 


dances had ceased entirely, being now proscribed as a wile of the 
Evil One. The young ladies wore mission-crosses on their bosoms, 
and formed themselves into pious organizations under the direc- 
tion of a Lady President. Everything tended towards a certain 
solemn gravity of deportment that was most laughable, if only 
one had dared to laugh. When the four whist-tables were laid 
ready for the dowagers and old gentlemen, and the two écarté 
tables for the younger folk, these young ladies used to take up their 
station, as if in Church, in a sanctuary apart, where they were 
entirely separated from the men, and formed a silent group in one 
corner of the drawing-room—silent—that is to say, considering 
their sex—for is not everything relative? They never spoke 
above a whisper, but yawned furtively, fit to yawn their poor 
heads off, their rigid attitudes offering a piquant contrast with the 
supple grace of their figures, the pink and lilac of their frocks 
and the bravery of their'fluttering silk furbelows and ribbons. 


II 


“The one thing,” continued the narrator of this history, in which 
everything is as true and living as the little town itself where it all 
happened, and which he had described in such lifelike terms that 
one of the company, less discreet than he, had just uttered its 
name, “the one thing that possessed any resemblance, I will not 
say to a passion, but to activity, desire, strong sensation, of any 
sort, in this strangely constituted society where the young girls 
had eighty years of world-weariness weighing on their calm and 
innocent hearts, was card-playing, that last resource of exhausted 
spirits. 

“Play was the one great business of these old aristocrats mod- 
elled, as they were, on the pattern of the grand Seigneurs of a 
former day, and as idle as a lot of old blind women. They played 
like Normans, the ancestors of the English, the most gambling na- 
tion on earth. Their kinship with this people, their residence in 
England during the emigration, the solemnity of the game, secret 


138 THE DIABOLIQUES 


and silent as the diplomacy of statesmen, all had combined to 
make them adopt whist, to fill up the bottomless abyss of their 
empty days. They used to play the game every evening after 
dinner up to midnight or even one o’clock in the morning,—which 
is wild dissipation in the country. To take a hand at the Marquis 
de Saint-Albans’ table was the crowning event of each man’s day. 
The Marquis was in a way the Feudal Lord of all of them, and 
they all flattered him with that sort of respectful consideration that 
is an Order of Merit in itself, when those who show it are them- 
selves worthy of consideration. 

“The Marquis was very good at whist. He was now seventy- 
nine, and had met most of the great men and great players of 
an earlier generation. . . . He had played with Maurepas, with 
the Comte d’Artois himself, who was as great at whist as he was 
at tennis, with the Prince de Polignac, with Bishop Louis de Ro- 
han, with Cagliostro, with the Prince de la Lippe, with Fox, Dun- 
das and Sheridan, with the Prince of Wales, with Talleyrand—with 
the Arch Fiend himself, they said, when he was going recklessly 
to the devil in the blackest days of the emigration. He required 
foemen therefore worthy of his steel. Generally speaking, the 
English who were on visiting terms with the local magnates sup- 
plied their contingent of efficients to the Marquis’s table, which 
was recognized as an established institution and always spoken of 
as M. de Saint-Albans’ game, just as they said the King’s game at 
Court. 

“One night at Madame de Beaumont’s the green tables stood 
ready as usual; they were only waiting for Monsieur Hartford, an 
Englishman, to complete the great Marquis’s game. He was a 
business man of a superior sort, this Monsieur Hartford, who ran 
a large cotton-mill at Pont-aux-Arches—I may observe parentheti- 
cally, one of the first of its kind established in Normandy, a coun- 
try so slow to adopt improvements, not from ignorance or any 
dullness of comprehension, but in virtue of that weariness that is 
the distinctive characteristic of the breed. 

“However, to return to our Englishman, Monsieur Hartford. 


BENEATH THE CARDS 139 


The young men all called him “Hartford” straight out, without 
any Monsieur, though fifty had long since struck on the silver 
timepiece of his head, which I can see now in my mind’s eye with 
its cropped hair, close and shiny as a white silk skull-cap. He was 
a prime favourite with the Marquis. This was not surprising, as he 
was a player of the first order, a man whose life, otherwise vain and 
insignificant, had no meaning or reality whatever except when he 
was seated at the whist-table. One phrase was for ever in his 
mouth, that ‘the best happiness of life was to win at cards, and the 
next best to lose-—a sublime axiom he had borrowed from Sheri- 
dan, but which he applied in so thorough a fashion as to excuse the 
plagiarism. For the rest, barring this one vice (in consideration of 
which the Marquis would have forgiven him the most eminent vir- 
tues), Monsieur Hartford was reputed to possess all those Phari- 
saic and Protestant qualities which English people sum up under 
the smug word “respectable.” He was reckoned a perfect gentle- 
man. ‘The Marquis used to invite him for a week at a time to his 
country-house, the Chateau de la Vanilliére, and in town he spent 
every evening in his company. 

“All were wondering to-night, the Marquis amongst the rest, at 
the unpunctuality of the Englishman, usually so precise and exact 
in all his doings. . . . It was in August; the windows were thrown 
open on one of those lovely gardens you only see in the country, 
and their recesses occupied by the young girls of the party, who 
were talking together as they leant their heads against the draper- 
ies. The Marquis, seated at the whist-table, was frowning with 
his long, white eyebrows, impatiently. His elbows were on the 
table, and his delicate old hands were clasped under his chin, 
while the dignified features expressed his royal displeasure at be- 
ing kept waiting; he looked for all the world like Louis XIV under 
similar circumstances, and was not a whit less majestic. At last 
a servant announced Monsieur Hartford, who appeared dressed, as 
always, to perfection, his linen dazzling in its whiteness, rings on 
all his fingers, as we have since seen Mr. Bulwer wear them, an 


Indian handkerchief in his hand, and between his lips (for he had 


140 THE DIABOLIQUES 


just dined) the scented pastille that covered the fumes of an- 
chovies, Harvey sauce and port-wine. 

“But he was not alone. He came forward and greeted the Mar- 
quis, introducing to him, as a sufficient shield against all reproof, 
one of his friends, a Scotchman, Monsieur Marmor de Karkoel, 
who had burst upon him like a bomb-shell in the middle of his 
dinner, and who was the best whist-player in the Three Kingdoms. 

“This latter circumstance at once brought a smile of welcome 
to the nobleman’s pale lips. The game was instantly made up. 
In his haste to get to work, Monsieur de Karkoel did not wait to 
remove his gloves, the perfection of which recalled that of the 
great Beau Brummell’s; these were cut by three special artists, 
two for the hand and another for the thumb. He was Monsieur de 
Saint Albans’ partner, the Dowager Comtesse de Hautcardon giv- 
ing up her place to him. 

“As to his personal appearance, ladies, Marmor de Karkoel 
was a man of not more than twenty-eight or thereabouts; but a 
burning sun, and the fatigues, perhaps the stormy passions, of an 
unknown past, had engraved on his features all the marks of a 
greater age. He looked thirty-five at least. His face was not 
handsome, but powerful and full of expression. The hair was 
black, coarse, straight and rather short, and his hand was contin- 
ually pushing it from his temples and throwing it back. This of- 
ten repeated gesture was full of a genuine but sinister kind of 
elegance—as it were, a constant effort to be rid of some remorse- 
ful memory. This was what first struck one, and always did so, 
like all profound impressions. 

“IT knew Karkoel for several years, and I am convinced this 
sombre gesture, repeated as it was ten times over in an hour, never 
failed to be impressive and invariably brought the same thought 
to the minds of a hundred different observers. His brow, low but 
well-cut, bespoke a bold and resolute spirit. His clean-shaven up- 
per lip (moustaches were not then commonly worn, as they are 
now) had a statuesque immobility which would drive Lavater to 
despair and disconcert believers in the doctrine that the secret of a 


BENEATH THE CARDS 141 


man’s nature is more clearly to be read in the mobile lines of the 
mouth than in the expression of the eyes. These latter took no 
part in his smile, which showed a row of teeth as white and even 
as so many pearls, such as these islanders often have—only to 
blacken and ruin them, like the Chinese, with copious libations 
of their horrid tea. The face was long and hollow-cheeked; the 
complexion of a natural olive hue, but heavily sunburnt into the 
bargain, in some climate where the rays of that luminary beat 
down with greater power than in dull, foggy Albion, or they could 
never have scorched him so fiercely. A long, straight nose, though 
not so straight and upright as the forehead, divided the two eyes. 
These were not so much black as dark, with a sombre depth that 
recalled Macbeth’s fatal look; they were set close together, which 
they say is the mark of a wild, ill-regulated character or else 
of some mental obliquity. He was well and elegantly dressed. 
Seated, as he now was, in a careless attitude at the whist-table, 
he seemed taller than he actually was, owing to a slight dispro- 
portion of the upper part of the body, for he was really short. 
Except for this defect, he was well built, his figure suggesting the 
same potentialities of strength and lithe agility as the tiger hides 
beneath his velvety skin. 

“Did he speak French well or ill? His voice, the golden chisel 
wherewith we carve our thoughts in the soul of our auditors and 
win their hearts, was it in harmony with the gesture I have de- 
scribed, and which I cannot even now recall without dreaming of 
it? ‘This much at any rate is certain, that evening it made no one 
tremble. He pronounced, and in the most ordinary tones, only 
the sacramental words of tricks and honours, the only expres- 
sions at whist which interrupt at measured intervals the solemn 
silence that enwraps the players. 

“In the large room, which was full of people, for whom the ar- 
rival of an Englishman more or less was a circumstance of great 
indifference, no one except those at the Marquis’s table paid any 
special heed to the unknown whist-player, towed in by Hartford 
in his wake. The group of girls did not so much as turn their 


142 THE DIABOLIQUES 


heads to cast a look at him over their shoulders. They were busy 
discussing (discussion was then first coming into vogue) the com- 
position of the Committee of their Association and the resignation 
of one of the Vice-Presidents, who was not’present that evening 
at Madame de Beaumont’s. This was surely a more important 
matter than watching any Englishman or Scotchman alive. In- 
deed, they were a trifle bored by these everlasting importations 
from Great Britain. This man would be like the rest of them; 
the only members of the sex he would waste a thought on would 
be the Queen of Diamonds and the Queen of Clubs! And a Prot- 
estant into the bargain! a heretic! If it had been a Catholic 
nobleman from Ireland, that would have been a very different 
thing! As for the older guests, who were already engaged in 
play at the different tables when Monsieur Hartford was an- 
nounced, they cast a perfunctory glance at the stranger who fol- 
lowed him in, and, this done, buried themselves once more in 
their cards, as swans bury their heads deep in the water when they 
dip their long necks below the surface. 

“Monsieur de Karkoel having been chosen as the Marquis de 
Saint Albans’ partner, the player facing Monsieur Hartford was 
the Comtesse du Tremblay de Stasseville, whose daughter Her- 
minie, the sweetest of all the girls who adorned the recessed win- 
dows of the drawing-room, was at the moment in conversation 
with Mademoiselle Ernestine de Beaumont. By chance her eyes 
fell in the direction of the table where her mother was playing. 

“Look, Ernestine,’ she exclaimed in a low voice, ‘look at the 
way the Scotchman deals!’ 

“Monsieur de Karkoel had now taken off his well-fitting gloves 
of scented kid, showing a pair of white, beautifully shaped hands, 
that a fashionable beauty would have cherished, if she had pos- 
sessed them, with religious care, and was now dealing out the 
cards, one by one as is done at whist, but with a circular sweep 
of such prodigious rapidity, it was as wonderful in its way as the 
Abbé Liszt’s fingering. A man that could handle the cards like 
that must needs be their master. . . . Ten years of a gambler’s life 


BENEATH THE CARDS 143 


stood confessed in the sleight of hand of this lightning-flash style of 
dealing. 

“<A hardly won triumph,’ was Ernestine’s criticism, delivered 
with a disdainful curl of the lip, “—of bad form!’ A harsh thing 
for so young a girl to say; but then in that pretty head good form 
counted for more than all the wit and wisdom of a Voltaire. She 
had missed her vocation, this Mademoiselle Ernestine; she should 
have been camerara major to a Queen of Spain. 

“The stranger’s style of play matched this extraordinary skill 
of his. He showed a superiority that intoxicated the old Marquis 
with delight, for did he not actually improve the game of this old 
partner of Fox and Sheridan, and lift it to the higher level of his 
own? Sovereign superiority of every kind has about it a fascina- 
tion that exerts an irresistible force of attraction and carries you 
away with it in its course. But this is not all; for it enriches you 
at the same time. Look at great talkers; repartee inspires rep- 
artee, and one witty word provokes another. Directly they cease 
speaking, fools robbed of the golden ray of inspiration that bright- 
ened their wits, gasp dull and helpless on the surface of the con- 
versation, like dead fish floating belly upwards, their scales invisi- 
ble. But Monsieur de Karkoel did more than merely give a new 
fillip to a man who had exhausted most emotions; he increased the 
Marquis’s estimate of his own powers and crowned with yet an- 
other stone the stately obelisk, that had long stood at the same 
height, which this King of Whist-players had raised to his own 
glory in the serene solitudes of his self-esteem. 

“Notwithstanding the excitement which made him feel young 
again, the Marquis kept an observant eye on the stranger during 
the game from the covert of the network of crow’s-feet (by this 
ugly name we designate Time’s signature on our temples, to pay 
him out for the insolence of writing it there) that fringed his keen 
eyes. A player such as this could only be relished and properly 
appreciated by a player possessed of rare powers himself. He 
wore a look of deep and serious concentration, ready with a new 
combination to meet each turn of the game, yet veiling it all under 


144 THE DIABOLIQUES 


a superb air of impassivity. Beside him the Egyptian Sphinx, 
crouching on her foundations of basaltic rock, would have looked 
like the genius of open-hearted expansiveness. He played as if his 
adversaries were simply three pairs of hands holding the cards, 
and he disdained to inquire whose hands they were. The dying 
breezes of that August night broke softly in waves of fragrance 
over the waving locks of the score of girls who were standing bare- 
headed at the open windows, and came laden with fresh perfumes 
of maidenhood to break against the stranger’s broad, low, sun- 
burnt brow; but it remained as hard and as unruffled as a rock of 
marble. He did not so much as notice it, this man of iron nerve. 
At this moment he was, indeed, worthy of the name of Marmor. 
Needless to say, he won. 

“The Marquis withdrew, as was his invariable custom, towards 
midnight. He was conducted to his carriage by the obsequious 
Monsieur Hartford, who lent him the support of his arm. 

“This Karkoel is the very God of Good Tricks! the Marquis 
said to him, surprised and delighted; ‘pray! see that he does not 
leave us too soon.’ 

“Hartford promised, and the old Marquis, in spite of his age 
and sex, was ready to play the part of a Siren of hospitality. 

“I have described at some length this first evening of a stay 
which lasted several years, though I was not present myself on 
the occasion, but I have heard it all from one of my relatives, who 
was some years my senior, and who like all the young men in this 
dull little town, where play was the one and only resource avail- 
able in the dearth of every germ of excitement, was an ardent 
whist-player, and readily fell under the ascendancy of the God of 
Tricks. Looking back now from the vantage-ground of later 
events, with all their magic of association, we may well invest the 
evening, so commonplace a bit of prose in itself —a game of whist 
and a winning hand—with an importance some might deem ex- 
aggerated. 

“The fourth player, the Comtesse de Stasseville, my informant 
would continue, lost her money with the same aristocratic indiffer- 


BENEATH THE CARDS 145 


ence which she displayed under all circumstances. Vet it was per- 
haps at this very game that her lot was decided by Destiny; for 
indeed which of us can understand one word of the mysteries of 
lifer . . . No one at the time had any particular interest in watch- 
ing the Countess. There was no sound in the room more striking 
than the tinkle of the counters used to mark the play. . . . Noth- 
ing could well be less likely than that anyone could have learned 
from the voice or appearance of this woman, then judged by one 
and all to be a cold and sharp icicle, whether what came subse- 
quently to be believed and repeated from mouth to mouth in awe- 
struck whispers, really and truly dated from this moment. 

“The Comtesse du Tremblay de Stasseville was a woman of 
forty; her health was poor, and she was pale and thin, but pale 
and thin in a way peculiar to herself, which I have never seen in 
anybody else. Her Bourbon nose, with its thin nostrils, her au- 
burn hair and exquisitely delicate lips proclaimed her a lady of 
birth, but one in whom pride might easily degenerate into cruelty. 
Her complexion was tinged with yellow and had an unhealthy 
look. 

“According to Mademoiselle de Beaumont, who ransacked even 
Gibbon for an epigram, if her name had been Constance, she 
might have been called Constantius Chlorus. 

“Anyone who understood the character of Mademoiselle de 
Beaumont’s wit was free to read a sinister meaning into the phrase. 
Yet in spite of her pallor, in spite of the faded colour of her 
lips, there was for an educated observer in those same lips of the 
Comtesse de Stasseville, thin, tense and vibrant as a stretched 
bow-string, an almost terrifying look of repressed eagerness and 
power of will. That provincial society did not notice it. She her- 
self saw nothing in the rigidity of that narrow, murderous-looking 
lip of hers but the steel spring on which for ever danced the 
barbed shaft of epigram. Eyes of bluish-green (vert, with spar- 
kles, or was the cognizance the Countess bore beneath her brows, 
as on her scutcheon) blazed like two fixed stars in a face they 
lighted but left cold. These twin emeralds, with yellow glints, set 


146 THE DIABOLIQUES 


under the pale, arched brows, were as cold as if they had been the 
very jewels recovered from the belly of Polycrates’ fish. 

“A keen and biting wit, sharp and shining as a Damascus sword- 
blade, alone lighted up now and again her glassy gaze with flashes 
of the ‘flaming sword which turned every way,’ of the Book of 
Genesis. Women hated the Comtesse du Tremblay for her sharp 
tongue as much as if she had been beautiful; and indeed it was 
her beauty. Like Mademoiselle de Retz, of whom the Cardinal 
has left so unflattering a portrait, she had a faulty figure that ill- 
natured people might fairly have called deformed. Her fortune 
was considerable. Her husband at his death had left her with 
the slight responsibility of two children. One was a little boy, as 
stupid as an owl, at present entrusted to the paternal, but most in- 
effectual, care of an old Abbé, who never taught him anything; 
the other was her daughter Herminie, whose beauty would have 
excited admiration in the most critical artistic circles of Paris. 
She had brought her up irreproachably, from the conventional 
point of view; but then with Madame de Stasseville irreproachable 
always implied something of insolent superiority. Even her vir- 
tue was made a ground for the same feeling, and it may be this 
was her strongest, if not her only, motive for preserving it so 
scrupulously. Virtuous at any rate she was, her good name defy- 
ing scandal. No serpent’s tooth of calumny had ever gnawed at 
that file. So her critics, bitterly resenting the impossibility of find- 
ing a flaw in her honour, made up for it by accusing her of cold- 
ness. ‘This was due no doubt, they said (so learned and scientific 
were they), to an inherited anemia. A little judicious pressure, 
and the best of her friends would have discovered in her the 
same hereditary obstacle that was invented against a very cele- 
brated and very charming great lady of the last century to account 
for the fact of her having had all the fashionable gentlemen of 
Europe at her knees for ten long years, without suffering one of 
them to advance a single inch higher.” 

The last words were a trifle risky, but the light tone in which 
they were spoken saved the situation, though they did occasion a 


BENEATH THE CARDS 147 


slight ruffle of offended modesty. I say modesty, not prudery, for 
with well-bred and high-born women, who are absolutely devoid 
of affectation, modesty is genuine and a very charming thing to 
see. However the daylight was now so dim that the movement 
was rather felt than seen. 

“Upon my word, she was just as you describe her, the Com- 
tesse de Stasseville,” observed the old Vicomte de Rassy, with his 
customary stammer. He had a humpback as well as a stammer, 
and wit enough to have been a cripple into the bargain. What 
Parisian does not know the Vicomte, that living memorandum of 
the little weaknesses of the eighteenth century? With a face as 
handsome in his young days as that of the Maréchal de Luxem- 
bourg himself, there was in his case too a reverse side of the medal 
—and the reverse was all that was left him now. As for the better 
side, it has been long ago defaced! . . . When young men found 
him out in some little anachronism of behaviour, he would ob- 
serve that at any rate he was not dishonouring his white hairs, 
for he always wore a chestnut tie-wig, with a false parting down 
the middle, and the most preposterous and utterly indescribable 
side-curls. 

“Ah! you knew her, then?” the speaker said, interrupting his 
narrative. “Very well! you can tell us, Vicomte, if I exaggerate 
in the least.” 

“Sir! ’tis as faithful as a tracing, your p—p—portrait,” re- 
turned the Vicomte, hitting himself a little blow on the cheek in 
impatience at his stammering tongue—at the imminent risk of 
knocking off some of the rouge they say he wears, as he does 
everything, with an entire absence of shame. “I knew her p—p— 
pretty near the date of your story. She was in the habit of visit- 
ing Paris every winter for a few days. I used to meet her at 
the Princess de C—C—Courtenay’s, to whom she was related in 
some way. Her wit was served up on ice; a woman cold enough 
to set you coughing!” 

“Except for those four or five days spent every winter in Paris,” 
resumed this uncompromising historian, who did not leave his 


148 THE DIABOLIQUES 


characters even the half-mask of Harlequin, “the Comtesse de 
Stasseville’s life was ruled with all the tiresome regularity of that 
monotonous piece of music, a respectable woman’s life in the Prov- 
inces. She was buried for six months of the year in her dull town- 
house in the little place I have described so particularly, exchang- 
ing it during the other six for her equally dull chateau on a fine 
estate she had a dozen miles away. Every second year she used 
to take her daughter with her to Paris—leaving her, when she 
visited the capital alone, under the charge of an old aunt, Made- 
moiselle de Triflevas—early in the winter; but never a thought of 
Spa, or Plombières, or the Pyrenees! She was seen at none of the 
usual watering-places. Was this due to the fear of what spiteful 
tongues might say? In the country when an unprotected female, 
in Madame de Stasseville’s circumstances, goes so far afield 
for health and amusement, what will not people imagine—what 
unworthy motives will they not suspect? This is the way the 
envy of those left behind takes toll of the pleasure of those who 
go travelling. The most fantastic winds of gossip breathe over 
these waters and disturb the placidity of their surface. Is it on 
the Yellow River or the Blue that they expose the infants in 
China? ... Our French watering-places have some resemblance 
to this river, whatever its name. If not a babe, there is always 
something, somebody or other’s good name being sacrificed there, 
in the opinion of the stay-at-homes. 

“The sarcastic Comtesse de Tremblay was too proud to sacrifice 
one of her caprices in deference to public opinion. But as a matter 
of fact she had no great love of watering-places, while her doctor 
much preferred to have her near him rather than four or five hun- 
dred miles away, for at that distance coddling visits, at ten francs 
each, cannot well be numerous. Moreover, it was a question 
whether the Countess had any special caprices. Wit is not imagi- 
nation; and her mind was of so clear-cut, incisive and positive a 
complexion, even in her least serious moods, that its nature seemed 
incompatible with the very idea of caprice. In moments of ex- 
pansion (but these were rare), it gave out so hard a ring, like 


BENEATH THE CARDS 149 


ebony castanets or the Basque drum, all tight-stretched parchment 
and little metallic bells, that you could never picture that dry, 
trenchant spirit as harbouring any element of imagination, any of 
those wistful reveries that rouse a longing to quit one’s own place 
for new surroundings. Any time during the ten years she had 
been a rich widow, and therefore mistress of herself and much else, 
she could easily enough have transferred her stagnant existence 
elsewhere, far from this poor little nest of nobles, where her eve- 
nings were wasted at whist or boston, in the company of a lot of 
old maids who had seen the Chouan rising, and aged warriors, ob- 
scure heroes who had helped to deliver Destouches. 

“Like Lord Byron, she might have roamed the world with a 
library, a portable kitchen and an aviary in her coach; but she 
had never shown the smallest inclination that way. She was 
something better than indolent, she was indifferent—as finely in- 
different as Marmor de Karkoel at the whist-table. Only Mar- 
mor was not really indifferent to whist, and in her life there was no 
whist—not a single thing to break the even tenor of her days! 
Her nature was of the stagnant sort; a woman dandy, the English 
would have called her. Except for her epigrams, she existed 
merely as a fashionable larva. ‘She belongs to the class of cold- 
blooded animals,’ her doctor used to whisper confidentially to his 
intimates, thinking to explain her by a simile, as a disease is diag- 
nosed by the symptoms. 

“Though she always looked ill, the baffled doctor declared that 
there was nothing the matter with her. Was this discretion? or 
was he really blind? At any rate she never complained of dis- 
comfort, whether physical or mental. She had not even that shade 
of melancholy, as much physical as anything else, that usually 
broods over the mortified features of women of forty. She knew 
the secret of growing old gracefully, without unseemly struggle 
and reluctance, watching the years go by with the same mocking 
glance (such as Undine might have cast from her sea-green eyes) 
as she had for all the circumstances of life. 

“She seemed determined to falsify her reputation as a woman 


150 THE DIABOLIQUES 


of strong mind by refusing altogether to accentuate her behaviour 
with any of those forms of originality we call eccentricities. She 
did quite simply and naturally whatever other women in her own 
circle did, neither more nor less. She was by way of demonstrat- 
ing that equality, of which the common herd dream in vain, is 
really only to be found amongst noblemen. There and there only 
all are peers, for their birth, the four generations of nobility re- 
quired to make a gentleman, level all distinctions. ‘I am only the 
first gentleman of France,’ Henri IV used to say, by these words 
subordinating the pretensions of each individual to the high status 
of all. Like the other ladies of her rank, whom she was too 
proud even to wish to excel, the Comtesse fulfilled all the exter- 
nal duties of religion and society with a quiet, sober exactitude that 
is the acme of good breeding in circles where enthusiasms of any 
kind are strictly barred. She neither lagged behind nor spurred on 
in front of her contemporaries. Had she so far subdued her spirit 
as to have finally accepted the monotonous existence of this dull 
little provincial town, where the remaining vestiges of her youth 
had dried up, like a stagnant pool asleep beneath its water-lilies? 
The common motives of mankind for action, motives of reason, 
conscience, instinct, reflection, temperament, predilection, threw 
no light on hers. No glimmer from within ever revealed the wom- 
an’s outward being; no outward condition ever reacted on her in- 
ward nature! ‘Tired out with waiting so long and never discover- 
ing anything about the Comtesse de Stasseville, her country 
neighbours, for all their patience (and country folk when they 
want to find something out, are as patient as a man in prison 
planning to get out or a fisherman waiting for a bite), had finally 
given up the enigma, as a man pitches a manuscript behind a box, 
when he finds it impossible to decipher it. 

““T think we are very stupid,’ the Comtesse de Hautcardon 
had declared dogmatically one evening—and this was now several 
years ago—‘to make such a rumpus about discovering what’s at 
the bottom of the woman’s soul. Most likely there’s nothing there 
at all? 


BENEATH THE CARDS 151 


III 


“And this ruling of the Dowager’s had been accepted as final, as 
having all the force of law, by these good people, annoyed and 
disappointed as they were at the futility of their observations, and 
only anxious to find a satisfactory reason for putting their wits to 
sleep again. It was still an article of belief, idly accepted by a 
heedless public, at the period when Marmor de Karkoel, appar- 
ently the very last man likely to come into the Comtesse du Trem- 
blay de Stasseville’s life, arrived from the other side of the world 
to take his seat at the green table where a partner was needed to 
make up the game. He was a native, so said his guide, philoso- 
pher and friend Hartford, of the wild, mist-wrapped Shetland Isles, 
the scene of Sir Walter Scott’s sublime tale of The Pirate—a char- 
acter Marmor was now to reproduce as understudy, with modifica- 
tions, in an obscure little town on the English Channel. He had 
been reared by the shores of the stormy sea furrowed by Cleve- 
land’s bark; as a youth he had footed the same dances young 
Mordaunt did in the story with old Irvil’s daughter. These he 
had never forgotten, and more than once I have seen him dance 
them on the polished oaken floors of our little town, so incon- 
gruous in its commonplace respectability with the wild, barbaric 
poetry of these Northern dances. At fifteen he had been bought 
a Commission as Lieutenant in an English regiment under orders 
for India, and for a dozen years had fought in the Mahratta wars. 
This much was soon found out from himself and his friend Hart- 
ford, as well as the fact that he was a gentleman of birth, related 
to the famous Scotch family of the Douglases, of the Bleeding 
Heart. 

“But this was all. The rest lay under a veil of mystery that 
was never to be lifted. His adventures in India, that great and 
terrible land where men are giants and catch a trick of deep- 
breasted breathing for which our Western air will not suffice, 
these he never told. They were traced in mysterious lettering on 
his dusky brow, a lid that was never lifted, like those Asiatic 


152 THE DIABOLIQUES 


poison-caskets which are guarded against the day of disaster and 
defeat in the jewel-house of Indian Rajahs. They stood half re- 
vealed in the keen flash of his dark eyes, a flash he could instantly 
extinguish under scrutiny, as you blow out a candle to escape be- 
ing seen, no less than in the quick gesture, already described, with 
which he would dash back his hair from his temples a dozen times 
in succession during a rubber of whist or a game of écarté. But 
apart from these hieroglyphics of gesture and physiognomy, legi- 
ble enough to competent observers, and like the language of the 
Egyptian hieroglyphics restricted to a very small number of words, 
Marmor de Karkoel was as undecipherable in his way as was the 
Comtesse du Tremblay in hers. He was a Cleveland, who never 
unlocked his lips. 

“All the young men, of family in the place, and there were sev- 
eral with plenty of wit, inquisitive as women and wily as ser- 
pents, were devoured with desire to get him to reveal the unpub- 
lished memoirs of his youth over a cigarette. But they had inva- 
riably failed to draw him. This sea-lion of the Hebrides browned 
by the suns of Lahore, declined to be caught in these petty snares 
baited to tickle his vanity, the sort of booby-trap in which a 
Frenchman’s self-conceit leaves all his peacock feathers behind, 
for the mere pleasure of showing off. The difficulty was insur- 
mountable. He was as sober as a Turk who obeys the Koran 
implicitly—a veritable mute, faithfully guarding the seraglio of 
his thoughts. I never saw him drink anything stronger than water 
or coffee. Card-playing certainly seemed a passion with him; but 
it is open to question whether this was genuine or only assumed, 
for a passion like a disease may be brought on artificially. Was 
it only a kind of screen which he set up to hide his real soul be- 
hind? I could never help thinking this was so, when I saw the 
way he played. He developed, cultivated, magnified the passion 
for play in the amusement-loving heart of the little town, to such 
a degree that, after he was gone, an atrocious spleen, the cruel 
spleen of baulked infatuations, fell on it like a sirocco, making the 
resemblance more striking than ever to an English city. At his 


BENEATH THE CARDS 153 


rooms the whist-table stood ready from an early hour in the morn- 
ing. His day, when not spent at Vanillére or some other chateau 
of the neighbourhood, was as simply ordered as that of men con- 
sumed by one fixed idea generally is. He rose at nine, took his 
cup of tea with some friend who had come to play whist, which 
began directly afterwards, to end only at five o’clock in the after- 
noon. As his little parties were always crowded, players were 
changed after each rubber, and such as were not playing betted 
on the game of those who were. Then it was by no means only 
young men who frequented these entertainments, but the most 
‘reverend signors’ of the place. Actually fathers of families, as 
ladies of a certain age observed, spent their days in this gambling- 
hell; and you may be sure they never let an occasion slip of 
attributing every possible evil motive to the objectionable Scotch- 
man, and emptying many a phial of gall over his unhappy head, 
as if he had inoculated the whole country-side with a pestilence 
in the persons of their husbands. This, though they were quite 
well used to seeing them play, but never before with this degree 
of persistent infatuation. 

“Towards five o’clock the party would break up, only to reas- 
semble later in the evening at some social gathering. There they 
would to all appearances conform to the ordinary style of play, 
such was approved by the hostesses of the houses they fre- 
quented, but in reality only to play out surreptitiously the morn- 
ing’s match at what they called ‘Karkoel’s game” I leave you 
to imagine to what a high level of play these enthusiasts attained, 
seeing this was now become the one and only thing they gave their 
minds to. They brought their whist to the height of the most 
difficult and superbly scientific fencing. No doubt considerable 
losses occurred sometimes; but what prevented anything in the 
way of catastrophe and ruin, such as high play invariably brings 
in its trail, was just this—the persistent eagerness and superior 
skill the players brought to bear. All the different factors ended 
by cancelling each other; besides, in so narrow a field, partners 
were necessarily so often interchanged that after a certain time 


154 THE DIABOLIQUES 


every player was bound, to use the technical phrase, to ‘have his 
revenge.’ 

“The influence Marmor de Karkoel exercised, an influence right- 
thinking women abhorred and secretly manceuvred against, far 
from diminishing, only increased the more. Nor was this to be 
wondered at. It owed its origin not so much to Marmor’s own 
strong personality as to the existence of a passion for play already 
flourishing in the soil on his arrival, but which his presence, shar- 
ing it and sympathizing with it as he did, roused into far greater 
activity. The best, perhaps the only means, of governing men, 
is to rule them through their passions. How, then, could Karkoel 
have missed his ascendancy? He possessed the main element of 
the power of governments, and yet he had no ambition to govern. 
All this enabled him positively to bewitch his willing subjects, 
and they almost fought for his society. The whole time he re- 
mained in the place, he invariably received the same welcome, 
and the most pressing, feverishly pressing, invitations. The very 
women who feared him would rather see him at their houses than 
know their sons or their husbands to be at his, and were always 
ready to receive him, as women will receive, even against their 
own inclination, a man who is the centre of attention, the nucleus 
of interest and action, no matter of what sort. 

“In summer, he would go for a fortnight or a month to the 
country. The Marquis de Saint Albans had made him the ob- 
ject of his special admiration—protection, I was going to say, but 
that is not a strong enough word. There, as in town, the whist- 
playing never ceased. I remember being present (I was a school- 
boy home for the holidays at the time) at a salmon fishing-party, 
where the company and the sport were both of the best, in the 
crystal waters of the Douve, and from beginning to end Marmor 
de Karkoel sat in a boat playing double dummy with a gentleman 
of the neighbourhood. He would have gone on playing, I verily 
believe, if the boat had upset and he had been tumbled into the 
river lis à 

“One member only of this society, and that one a woman, never 


BENEATH THE CARDS 166 


invited the Scotchman to her house in the country, and very seldom 
to her entertainments in town. This was the Comtesse du Trem- 
blay. And who could wonder at it? She was a widow with a 
young and charming daughter. In the petty society of a country 
town, so full of envy and narrow-mindedness, and where it is 
everyone’s business to poke into other people’s affairs, too many 
precautions cannot be taken to guard against those ill-natured in- 
ferences from the known to the unknown which are so easy to 
draw. The Comtesse du Tremblay was duly cautious, never once 
asking Marmor to the Chateau de Stasseville, and in town only 
receiving him on the most public occasions, when she gathered all 
her acquaintances around her. Her manner towards him was 
cold, polite and formal, expressing merely the consideration a well- 
bred person owes to everyone, not so much for their sake as for 
one’s own. He responded with the same kind of impersonal po- 
liteness; and so natural was this to both, so little a matter of 
affectation, that it aroused no suspicion for four years. 

“Away from the card-table, as I have already mentioned, Ker- 
koel could scarcely be said to have any separate existence, and 
rarely opened his mouth. This habitual silence, if he had any- 
thing to conceal, formed an excellent screen for the purpose. On 
the other hand, the Comtesse, you may remember, was anything 
but secretive, and only too ready to express her true sentiments 
in some biting phrase. For natures of this kind, expansive, bril- 
liant, aggressive, as they are, self-restraint, self-effacement is al- 
ways difficult. ‘To hide one’s true character, is this not, in a way, 
to betray oneself? But then, if she had the fascinating, iridescent 
scales and triple tongue of the serpent, she had the cunning too. 
There was nothing therefore to modify the usual savage impetu- 
osity of her witty onslaughts. Often, when Karkoel was men- 
tioned in her presence, she would fire off one of those phrases that 
sting and wound, and which turned Mademoiselle de Beaumont, 
her rival in the gentle art of epigram, green with envy. Was it 
only another piece of deception?—if so, never was deception better 
and bolder! Was this terrible power of dissimulation an integral 


156 THE DIABOLIQUES 


part of her dry, warped chee But then, why practise it at 
all? for was she not the very personification of independence by 
virtue of her position and proud, sarcastic nature? Why, if she 
loved the man, and her love was returned, why hide it beneath the 
cruel gibes she cast at him from time to time, under witticisms, 
the traitorous, renegade, impious witticisms, that depreciate and 
degrade the adored image, the vilest sacrilege in love? 

“Who can tell? it may be she found some source of happiness 
in it all. . . . Now, looking at her”—the narrator turned to Doc- 
tor Beylasset, who stood leaning one elbow on a Buhl cabinet, and 
whose fine bald brow reflected back the light of a candelabra the 
servants had lighted a moment before above his head—“looking 
at the Comtesse de Stasseville from the sound commonplace phys- 
iological point of view—as you doctors do, an example our moral- 
ists might follow with advantage—you could not help seeing quite 
plainly that, in this impressionable nature, everything was bound 
to strike home, to penetrate inwards, like the line of faded rose 
traced by the strongly retracted lips, like the stiff, unquivering 
nostrils, that narrowed under excitement instead of dilating, like 
the eyes, so deeply sunk within their orbits that they seemed some- 
times to be retreating backwards into the brain altogether. In 
spite of her apparent delicacy of constitution and a physical weak- 
ness whose effects could be traced through her whole being like 
the gradual spreading of a crack in a substance splitting from ex- 
cess of dryness, she bore the most unmistakable signs of a strong 
will, the Volta battery within us which is the centre of our nerves. 
Everything about her testified to this more strikingly than in any 
other living being I have ever seen. This flux and reflux of 
slumbering will-power, of potential energy (forgive the pedantry 
of the expression), was manifested even in her hands, aristocratic 
and princely in their whiteness, the opalescent smoothness of the 
nails, and their general elegance, but which, in their extreme lean- 
ness, the complication of swollen veins that marked them with a 
thousand corded blue lines, and above all, the nervous, furtive way 


they had of grasping things, resembled those harpy claws which 


BENEATH THE CARDS 167 


classic poetry, with its exuberance of fantastic imagery, attributes 
to certain fabulous monsters with women’s faces and bosoms. 
When, after darting out one of her sayings, one of her shafts of 
sarcasm, as keen and glittering as the poisoned arrows of the sav- 
ages, she passed her viperish tongue over her sibilant lips, you 
felt instinctively that in a supreme emergency, some fatal moment 
of destiny, the woman, at once so frail and so strong, would be 
quite capable of adopting the Negro’s resource of resolutely swal- 
lowing that lambent tongue. To look at her was to be convinced 
she was, among womankind, an example of those organisms to be 
found in every domain of nature which, by predilection or instinct, 
look to the bottom rather than to the surface of things; one of 
those beings predestined for occult associations, plunging into the 
depths of life as bold swimmers dive deep, and swim beneath the 
surface, or as miners breathe the air of subterranean vaults. Such 
creatures love mystery for its own sake, and out of the very pro- 
fundity of their nature, create it around them, loving and pursuing 
it even to the extent of downright deception—for, after all, what is 
deception but a doubling of mystery, a further darkening of the 
curtains of secrecy, a weaving about them of wilful darkness? 
It may well be such natures love deception for deception’s sake, as 
others love art for art’s sake, or as the Poles love battle.” Here 
the Doctor gravely nodded his head in sign of agreement. “You 
think so! well! so do I. I am convinced there are souls whose 
happiness consists in imposture. These find a hateful, but in- 
toxicating, bliss in the very notion of falsehood and deceit, in the 
thought that they alone know their true selves, and they are play- 
ing off a Comedy of Errors upon society, reimbursing themselves 
for the expense of representation with all the fine contempt they 
feel for their poor dupes.” 

“But what you’re saying now is simply atrocious!” suddenly 
exclaimed the Baronne de Mascranny, interrupting, in the tone of 
one whose belief in her fellow-creatures is scandalized. 

Every woman in his audience (and very possibly some ama- 
teurs of secret pleasures were amongst the number) had expe- 


158 THE DIABOLIQUES 


rienced a certain thrill at the speaker’s last words. I knew it by 
the Comtesse de Damnaglio’s naked back, which at the minute was 
in such close proximity to my eyes. The particular sort of ner- 
vous thrill I mean is familiar to everybody by experience. It is 
sometimes poetically called the Angel of Death going by. Was 
it this time perhaps the Spirit of Truth going by? .. , 

“Why, yes!” returned the narrator, “atrocious enough, no doubt! 
Only, is it true? People who wear their hearts on their sleeve, 
as people say, can form no notion of the furtive joys of systematic 
hypocrisy, the solitary gratifications of such as live and breathe 
without difficulty under the confinement of a mask. But, if you 
come to think of it, it is easy to understand how the satisfactions 
they enjoy have actually all the deep intensity of hell’s fiery de- 
lights. For what is hell but a heaven reversed, below instead of 
above? The two words devilish and divine, when applied to ex- 
tremes of enjoyment, express one and the same idea, v1z., sen- 
sations that overpass the bounds of nature and reach the super- 
natural. Was Madame de Stasseville one of these strange souls? 
I would rather not say either yes or no! All I propose to do is 
to give her story to the best of my ability. No one really knows 
the rights of it, and my only object is to throw what light I may 
on the mysterious tale by a naturalistic study of her personality, 
such as Cuvier bestowed on the subjects of his science. This and 
nothing more. 

“I can picture the Comtesse du Tremblay now from memory, in 
which her image in all its details stands out as clearly and distinct 
as the deep-cut lines of an onyx seal impressed on wax; but such 
analysis was far beyond me at the time. If I have read her char- 
acter aright, this was only possible afterwards. . . . The over- 
mastering will-power I recognized in her on mature reflection, when 
experience had taught me how truly the body is the mould of the 
soul, had as yet no more stirred and widened her narrow life, shut 
in between her placid habits, than the ocean-wave disturbs some 
Highland sea-loch, close shut in by its environing hills. But for 
the arrival of Karkoel, the English infantry officer his countrymen 


BENEATH THE CARDS 159 


had sent to eat out his life on half-pay in this petty Norman 
town, the dull respectablity of which made it worthy to be Eng- 
lish, this pale and ailing woman with the mocking tongue, she 
whom some called the Lady of the Frost, in playful derision at 
her coldness, would never even herself have come to know the im- 
perious will that lay within her bosom of melted snow as Made- 
moiselle Ernestine de Beaumont called it. On its glassy surface, 
hard-ribbed as polar ice, no moral scruple availed to make the 
smallest permanent impression. 

“What was the immediate effect of his coming? Did she in- 
stantly learn the secret that, for a nature such as hers, to feel 
strongly is to will inexorably: Did she, by sheer exercise of will, 
draw to her side a man who seemed to have no passion left for 
anything but cards? . . . How did she contrive an intimacy, in 
this country town where the risks of discovery were so many? . .. 
Mysteries all—and mysteries still. But at the latter end of 
182 .. , for all the suspicions arrived later on, no living soul en- 
tertained a thought of anything wrong. Yet at that very moment, 
in one of the most peaceful-looking mansions in the whole town, 
where whist was the great event of every day, and I had almost 
said every night, behind the silent shutters and embroidered mus- 
lin curtains, the chaste, elegant, half-dropped veils of a quiet life, 
there must have been developing a tragic romance the world would 
have sworn to be utterly impossible. Yes! romance was there, in 
that correct, irreproachable, well-regulated life, a life cold and 
cynical to a fault, where intellect scorned to count for every- 
thing, and soul for nothing, gnawing, under all this outside show 
of ultra-respectability and good repute, gnawing at its vitals, like 
worms that have begun to devour a man’s body before the breath 
was out of it.” 

“Oh! the horrid simile!” again interrupted the Baronne de 
Mascranny. “My poor Sibyl was partly right in not wishing to 
hear your story. Your imagination has surely run away with you 
to-night.” 

“Shall I stop?” responded the other politely, but with the sly 


160 THE DIABOLIQUES 


look and teasing manner of a man who is sure of the interest he 
has aroused. 

“The idea!” cried the Baronne to this proposal; “as if you could 
leave off now in the middle of a half-told tale, with us all on the 
tiptoe of expectation!” 

“That would be too great a strain!” put in Mademoiselle Laure 
d’Alzanne, looking as she sat there unwinding one of her fine dark 
ringlets in her fingers, the very image of happy idleness, startled 
into a graceful protest by the threatened interruption of her quiet 
enjoyment of the narrative. 

“And most disappointing!” added the Doctor with a laugh. 
“Just as if a barber, after shaving one side of your face, were 
quietly to shut his razor and tell you he could not possibly do 
anything more.” ... 

“Well, then! to proceed,” resumed the narrator, with the fine 
directness of the art that conceals art; “In 182 ...I1 was 
in the drawing-room of one of my uncles, who was mayor 
of the little town which I have described to you as so un- 
likely a scene for anything like passion or adventure. Al- 
though it was a solemn occasion, the Fête du Roi, kept on Saint 
Louis’s Day, and always highly honoured by these aristocrats, 
these political quietists who had devised that mystic phrase of 
disinterested loyalty, ‘No matter what, long live the King!—still 
nothing more was going on in the rooms than what took place 
there every day of the week. In other words, the company were 
at cards. 

“I must ask your pardon for talking about myself; it is bad 
taste, but necessary for once. I was still in my teens; but thanks 
to an exceptional upbringing, I had more of an inkling of the 
secrets of life and love than is generally possessed by lads 
of my age then. I was less like a great awkward school- 
boy, whose eyes have never looked on anything outside his 
text-books, than an inquisitive girl, one of the sort who educate 
themselves by listening at keyholes and pondering for hours over 
what they have picked up there. The whole town crowded that 


BENEATH THE CARDS 161 


evening to my uncle’s house, and as always happened—all things 
were eternal in their sameness in this world of mummies, who only 
shook loose their wrappings to wield the cards—the company was 
divided into two sections, those who played and the young ladies 
who did not. Mummies, too, the poor girls whose only destiny 
was to take their niche one after another in the catacombs of old- 
maidenhood, but whose faces, sparkling with ineffectual vitality 
and breathing a freshness no man would ever enjoy, fascinated 
my eager gaze. 

“Among them all, there was perhaps only one, Mademoiselle 
Herminie de Stasseville, whose position allowed her to think for 
a moment of a love-match as anything else than a miracle, impos- 
sible of realization without derogation from their proper rank. I 
was not old enough, or else I was too old, to mingle with this 
bevy of young beauties, whose whisperings were every now and 
again interrupted by a frank peal of laughter, a pretty, half- 
stifled giggle. A prey to a boy’s hot self-consciousness, at once 
a delight and a torment to him, I had taken refuge in a seat near 
the God of Tricks, Marmor de Karkoel, whose fervent admirer I 
was. Friendship of course was out of the question between us. 
But sentiment has its secret hierarchy, and it is no uncommon 
thing to see, in undeveloped natures, occult sympathies existing 
that nothing definite or demonstrable will account for. Children, 
like savages, who are only grown-up children, must have a chief to 
reverence; and Karkoel was my chief. 

“He used often to visit at my father’s house, a great whist- 
player like all the men of his circle. Moreover, he had frequently 
taken part in our athletic recreations, in which he had displayed 
before my brothers and myself a strength and activity that bor- 
dered on the marvellous. Like the Duc d’Enghien, he could clear 
a seventeen-foot brook and think nothing of it. This alone was 
bound to exercise an immense fascination over lads like ourselves, 
who were being brought up to be soldiers; but this was not the 
mysterious magnet that drew me so irresistibly to the man. It 
must surely have been that his personality acted on my imagina- 


162 THE DIABOLIQUES 


tion with all the force exceptional beings exert over others equally 
exceptional—for a commonplace nature is always a safeguard 
against higher influences, exactly as a bag of wool serves to stop 
cannon-balls. I cannot tell what wild dreams were suggested to 
my fancy by that brow, modelled, you would have said, in the 
substance water-colour painters call Sienna earth, by those sinister 
eyes under their narrow lids, by the marks unknown storms of 
passion had left behind them on the Scotchman’s frame like the 
four bludgeon-strokes of the hangman on a criminal at the wheel. 
What fascinated me most of all, however, was his hands, in which 
all signs of savage strength ended at the wrist, and which could 
deal round the cards with that astounding rapidity that was like 
a revolving flame and had so impressed Herminie de Stasseville 
the first time she saw it. 

“Well, to-night in the corner where the whist-table stood, the 
Venetian shutter was half closed, and the players looked as som- 
bre as the sort of half-light that surrounded them. It was a cham- 
pions’ game. ‘The Methuselah of Marquises, Monsieur de Saint 
Albans, was Marmor’s partner, while the Comtesse du Tremblay 
had for hers the Chevalier de Tharsis, an officer in the Regiment 
of Provence before the Revolution and a Knight of Saint Louis, 
one of those veterans who are now extinct, who stood astride of 
two centuries, so to speak, yet had nothing of the Colossus about 
them for all that. At one particular moment of the game, in 
consequence of a movement of Madame du Tremblay’s hands to 
pick up her cards from the table, one of the diamonds that 
sparkled on her finger, caught in the shadow which the darkened 
window threw over the green table, making it a heavier green 
than ever, a sudden glint of light, which, meeting the facets of 
the stone at some subtle angle no human art is cunning enough 
to repeat, threw out an electric shaft of white brilliancy so daz- 
zling it almost hurt the eyes like a flash of lightning. 

“Eh, what! what is it flashes so?’ shrilled the Chevalier de 
Tharsis in a voice thin as his legs. 

““And who is it coughs so?’ chimed in the Marquis de Saint- 


BENEATH THE CARDS 163 


Albans simultaneously, disturbed in his wrapped attention to the 
game by a dreadful, hollow cough, and turning towards Herminie, 
who was working an embroidered collar for her mother. 

“My diamond, and my daughter,’ responded the Comtesse du 
Tremblay, a smile on her thin lips, answering both inquiries at 
once. 

““Flow superb your diamond is, Madame!’ exclaimed the 
Chevalier. ‘I have never seen it shine so brilliantly as it does 
to-night; it would force the blindest to notice it.’ 

“As he said this, they finished the game, and the Chevalier de 
Tharsis took the Comtesse’s hand in his own, with the words, 
‘Will you let me look?’ 

“The Comtesse languidly removed her ring, and threw it over 
to the Chevalier on the card-table. 

“The old nobleman examined it with interest, turning it about 
like a kaleidoscope. But light is often tricky and capricious, and 
fall as it might on the facets of the stone, it struck out no second 
flash and sparkle to compare with the sudden, startling gleam of 
a moment ago. 

“Herminie got up and went to the window to push open the 
shutter, that the daylight might fall better on her mother’s ring 
and bring out its full beauty. 

“This done, she resumed her seat and, resting her elbow on 
the table, fixed her eyes also on the prismatic jewel; but another 
fit of coughing seized her, a terrible, whistling cough that in- 
jected the pearly white of her fine eyes with blood, reddening the 
normal purity of their pellucid depths. 

““And where did you get that fearful cough, my dear?’ asked 
the Marquis de Saint-Albans, more taken up with the girl than 
the ring, with the human than the mineral jewel. 

“I don’t know, really,’ she answered lightly with the heedless- 
ness of youth, that cannot realize that life is not eternal. ‘Per- 
haps it was walking in the night air by the lake in the park at 
Stasseville.’ 

“I was struck at the time by the group the four of them made. 


164 THE DIABOLIQUES 


“The red light of the setting sun beat in at the open window. 
The Chevalier de Tharsis was looking at the diamond; Monsieur 
de Saint-Albans at Herminie, Madame du Tremblay at Karkoel, 
who himself was turning a lack-lustre eye on the Queen of Dia- 
monds he held in his hand. But what impressed me most was 
Herminie. The Rose of Stasseville was pale, actually paler than 
her mother. The purple of the dying day, throwing its transpar- 
ent reflection over her pallid cheeks, gave her all the look of some 
doomed victim, the face reflected in a mirror silvered, so it seemed, 
with blood instead of quicksilver. 

“Of a sudden a shiver ran through my nerves, and a lightning- 
flash of memory startled me with the invincible brutality of those 
ideas which violate one’s mind but fecundate it. 

“About a fortnight before, I had gone one morning to Marmor 
de Karkoel’s rooms. It was quite early, and I had found him 
alone. None of the enthusiasts that came every forenoon to play 
cards with him had yet arrived. When I entered, he was stand- 
ing before his writing-desk, engaged apparently in some very 
delicate operation, requiring extreme attention and great steadi- 
ness of hand. His head was bent over his work, so that I could 
not see his face. In his right hand he held between his fingers 
a tiny phial of some black, shiny substances (it looked just like 
the tip of a broken dagger), and from this microscopical phial he 
was pouring some mysterious liquid into the cavity of a ring. 

“What on earth are you after there?’ I called out to him, com- 
ing forward. But he cried in a voice of command: ‘Stop where 
you are! not a step nearer, or you'll make my hand shake, and 
what I am doing now is more difficult, and far more dangerous, 
than to break a corkscrew at forty paces with a pistol liable 
to burst at any moment.’ 

“He was alluding to a little adventure we had had a while 
before. We were amusing ourselves by shooting with the worst 
pistols we could possibly get hold of, so that the marksman’s 
skill might be brought out in a stronger light by the very imper- 


BENEATH THE CARDS 165 


fection of his weapon, and we had precious nearly blown our 
brains out with one that burst its barrel... . 

“He succeeded in insinuating a few drops of the unknown liquid 
into the hollow ring, letting them fall one by one from the pointed 
tip of the phial. This done, he shut the ring carefully, and 
tossed it into one of the drawers of his writing-desk as if desirous 
of hiding it from inspection. 

“I then noticed he wore a glass mask. 

“Since when,’ I said in a rallying tone, ‘since when have you 
been dabbling in chemistry? Are you compounding a specific 
against losing at whist?” 

“No! I’m compounding nothing,’ he replied; ‘but what’s in- 
side there [pointing to the black phial] is a specific against all 
the ills of life-—adding with the grim humour of the land of 
suicides from which he hailed: ‘It is the sharper’s pack that in- 
sures a man against losing his last rubber with Destiny,’ 

““And what poison is it? I asked him, taking up the phial, 
the shape of which roused my curiosity. 

“The most exquisite of all the Indian poisons,’ he returned, 
removing his mask. ‘To breathe it is very often death, and, no 
matter how absorbed into the system, there is no need whatever 
to be anxious, even if it does not kill right off. You lose nothing 
by the delay, for its effect is as sure as it is secret; it attacks, 
slowly indeed, almost languidly, but still infallibly the very 
sources of life itself, striking inwards and developing deep down 
in the organs it assails, some disease of the kind everybody is 
familiar with and the symptoms of which are so well known to 
physicians that they would quite disarm suspicion and be a suffi- 
cient answer to any accusation of poisoning, even supposing such 
a charge at all likely to be made. They say in India the mendi- 
cant fakirs compound the drug with substances of an extreme 
rarity, known to themselves alone and found only in the remote 
highlands of Tibet. Its action is rather to dissolve away the 
cords of life. In this it only conforms to the Indian character, 


166 THE DIABOLIQUES 


so gentle and apathetic, to which death is but slumber, and a 
death-bed a soft and restful couch of lotus. It is excessively 
difficult, in fact next door to impossible, to procure. If you only 
knew all the risks I ran to get this phial from a woman who 
professed to love me. . . . I have a friend, an officer like myself 
in the English service, and like me now home from India, where 
he has spent seven years of his life. He sought this poison with 
all the frenzied energy of an Englishman’s caprice—and some day, 
when you have lived longer, you will understand what that is. 
Well! he could never find the real thing, though he bought more 
than once wretched imitations at more than their weight in gold. 
In despair he has lately written to me from England, enclosing me 
one of his rings and praying me to put into it some drops of this 
elixir of death. And that is what I was doing, when you came in.’ 

“What he told me caused me little surprise. Men are so con- 
stituted that, without any evil intention or one thought of ill, they 
take a pleasure in having poison by them, as they do any other 
deadly weapon. They hoard the means of spreading death and 
destruction around them, as misers hoard gold. They say to 
themselves: ‘If I should wish to kill!” just as the others say: 
‘If I should wish to spend!’ The same childish fancy dominates 
both. I was no more than a child myself at the time, and I 
found it nothing out of the way that Marmor de Karkoel, the 
Anglo-Indian, should possess this strange, unique, exotic poison, 
and among the kandjars and native arrows he had brought from 
foreign parts in his soldier’s chest, should have this phial of black 
agate, this plaything of death and devastation, to show me. When 
I had sufficiently turned and twisted about in my fingers the 
pretty polished toy, that perhaps some dancing-girl had worn 
suspended between the tiny topaz globes of her bosom, and im- 
pregnated its porous substance with the golden sweat of her body, 
I dropped it into a cup standing on the chimney- ae and 
thought no more about the matter. 

“Well! you will hardly credit it, but it was the recollection of 
this very phial that now flashed across my mind! . . . Herminie’s 


BENEATH THE CARDS 167 


look of suffering, her pallor and the hacking cough that seemed 
to issue from lungs all flaccid and spongy with disease, through 
whose substance perhaps some of those deep and health-destroy- 
ing lesions were even now eating their way, that are known to 
medicine—am I not right, Doctor?—under the terribly picturesque 
name of caverns, the ring which by a strange coincidence sud- 
denly darted out so extraordinary a gleam of vivid brilliance just 
as the girl was seized with her fit of coughing, as if the flash of 
the fatal stone had been the murderer’s start of triumph, the in- 
cidents of my morning visit, which had till then entirely slipped 
my memory but were now instantly revived in perfect clearness— 
all this came rushing in a flood of troublous thought into my 
head! But yet between the past and present what real connec- 
tion could I find? The inference I had drawn involuntarily in 
my own mind was manifestly absurd. I was horrified at my 
atrocious thoughts and endeavoured to crush them down—to ex- 
tinguish this misleading dream, this ignis fatuus of suspicion, that 
had flared up in my brain like the flash of the Countess’s diamond 
across the green table! ... To steady my wits, and be done 
once and for all with the silly, wicked notion I had for a moment 
allowed myself to entertain, I turned a scrutinizing eye on Mar- 
mor de Karkoel and the Comtesse du Tremblay. 

“Their whole attitude and look gave but one answer—the thing 
I had dared to fancy was preposterous! There stood Marmor 
the same as ever, his eyes still gazing at his Queen of Diamonds, 
as if she, and she only, represented the fixed and final passion of 
his life. Madame du Tremblay on her part wore in brow and 
lips and countenance the calmness that never deserted her—not 
even when she was aiming an epigram, for her sarcasm was like 
a bullet, the only instrument of death that kills without a stir of 
passion, whereas the sword partakes of the anger and excitement 
of the hand that wields it. They were two abysses, face to face; 
but while Karkoel was dark and black as night, the other, the 
pale-eyed Madame du Tremblay, was clear and inscrutable as 
space itself. She held her glittering eyes fixed on her partner 


168 THE DIABOLIQUES 


with an indifferent, impassive gaze. But as the Chevalier de 
Tharsis seemed as though he would never have done with the 
examination of the ring, that enclosed the mystery I so longed 
to penetrate, she had taken from her belt a big bouquet of mig- 
nonette, and began to inhale its fragrance with an intensity of 
sensual satisfaction no one would ever have expected from a 
woman so little formed apparently for dreamy delights of any 
kind. Presently her steady eyes swerved and dropped under the 
stress of some mysterious languorous impulse and the lids closed, 
and seizing in her thin colourless lips some stalks of the fragrant 
mignonette with a passionate avidity, she gnawed them between 
her teeth, her eyes once more wide open, and fixed on Karkoel’s 
face with a wild look of almost idolatrous self-surrender. Was 
it a signal, a token, a something agreed upon between two lovers, 
this gnawing and chewing the flowers without a word?... 
Frankly, I thought it was. She tranquilly restored the ring to 
its place on her finger when at last the Chevalier had done ad- 
miring it, and the game went on again, discreet, silent and sombre, 
as if nothing had interrupted it.” 

At this point the speaker made yet another pause. Indeed, 
there was no need for him to hurry; he held us all spellbound by 
his tale. It may be the whole merit of the story lay in his man- 
ner of telling it. . . . When the voice stopped, you could plainly 
hear the audience breathing in the silence that ensued. With my 
own eyes, peeping over my alabaster screen, the Comtesse de 
Damnaglia’s shoulder, I could discern the marks of excited interest 
stamped on every face, though in various degrees and variously 
expressed. Involuntarily I looked round for Sibyl to see how she 
took it, she who had raised her childish protest at the very start of 
the narrative. I should have liked to watch the horror grow and 
gleam in her dark eyes—that make you think of the gloomy, 
sinister Canal Orfano at Venice, for indeed more hearts than one 
will some day drown in their depths. But she was no longer at 
her mother’s sofa. Uncertain how the tale would end, the care- 


BENEATH THE CARDS 169 


ful Baronne had doubtless given her some private signal to slip 
away unseen, and she had left the room. 

“As a matter of fact,” the narrator went on again, “what was 
there after all in anything I had seen to move me so strongly and 
eat like an acid into the tablets of my memory, for time has not 
even now effaced a single outline of the scene? I can still see 
Marmor de Karkoel’s face, and the Comtesse’s look of stony calm, 
melting for one emotional instant, when the scent of mignonette 
was inhaled and the poor flowers were ground between her teeth 
with something very like a shiver of voluptuous satisfaction. 

All this has remained clear-cut in my memory, and I will tell 
you why. These circumstances, the mutual connection of which 
I could not then properly understand, half revealed as they were 
by an intuition I blamed myself for harbouring, a tangled skein 
of the possible and impossible, the comprehensible and the in- 
comprehensible, received subsequently a spark of light which dis- 
sipated their obscurity once for all and brought order out of the 
chaos of my mind. 

“As I think I have already told you, I was sent to college very 
late. The last two years of my education passed without my 
coming home at all. Accordingly it was at college I first heard, 
through letters from my relatives, of Mademoiselle Herminie de 
Stasseville’s death, who had succumbed, they told me, to a wast- 
ing disease no one had thought serious till the very end, when 
cure had become hopeless. The news, which they told me with- 
out commentary of any kind, froze my blood with the same chill 
of horror I had before experienced in my uncle’s drawing-room 
when I first heard that churchyard cough, which had suddenly 
roused such fearful suspicions in my mind. Any who can enter 
into the more sacred feelings of the soul will understand me 
when I say I had not the heart to ask a single question as to 
the poor girl’s death, thus snatched away from her mother’s 
love and life’s brightest hopes. My thoughts on the subject were 
too tragic for me to speak of it to any living being. 


170 THE DIABOLIQUES 


“On returning to my father’s house later on, I found the town 
of much altered; for in the course of years towns alter as 
much as women, and grow quite unrecognizable. 1830 was past 
and over. Since the day when Charles X had passed through the 
place on his way to take ship at Cherbourg, the greater part of 
the noble families I had known during my boyhood lived in re- 
tirement in the surrounding country-houses. The political catas- 
trophe had hit these families the harder from the fact of their 
having fully expected their party to be victorious, so that they 
now felt all the bitterness of disappointed hopes. In fact, they 
had witnessed the moment when the right of primogeniture, re- 
stored by the only veritable statesman the Restoration could show, 
was to re-establish French society on the only true basis, that of 
a great and vigorous monarchy; then by a sudden and unexpected 
turn of fortune, they had seen this cherished idea, no less ex- 
pedient than it was just, an idea that had flattered the eyes of 
these gallant dupes of their own loyal enthusiasm, and had 
seemed to offer them a recompense for all their ruin and mis- 
fortunes, to give them a last rag of vair and ermine to line their 
coffin withal and make their last sleep less hard—they had seen 
this idea perish under the stress of public opinion that had proved 
itself alike impervious to enlightenment and intractable to dis- 
cipline. The little town so often referred to in my story had be- 
come a mere desert of closed shutters and barred gates. The 
Revolution of July had frightened away the English from a town 
the habits and customs of which had been so rudely broken in 
upon by the force of events. 

“My first care was to inquire what had become of Monsieur 
Marmor de Karkoel. I was told he had gone back to India by 
order of his government. The individual who gave me this in- 
formation was no other than the same Chevalier de Tharsis, who 
did not look a day older. He had been one of the players on the 
occasion made memorable—at any rate to me—by the incident of 
the diamond ring, and his eye, as he replied, fixed mine with all 
the look of a man who is eager and anxious to be questioned. 





BENEATH THE CARDS 171 


Almost before I knew it (so quick are men to divine the work- 
ings of each other’s minds, long before the will has had time to 
act), I found myself asking him the question: 

“And Madame du Tremblay de Stasseville, what of her?” 

“You have heard something” he cried with an air of mystery, 
as if we had a hundred pairs of ears round us to hear all we said, 
instead of being entirely alone, as was the case. 

“Oh, no!’ I answered; ‘I know nothing.’ 

“She is dead,’ he then told me; ‘dead of a chest complaint, 
like her daughter. She died a month after that infernal Marmor 
de Karkoel left the town.’ 

What has that to do with it? I could not help interrupting 
him; ‘and why mention Marmor de Karkoel’s name at all? ... 

“Tt is really true, then, you knew nothing whatever about it!’ 
exclaimed the old man. ‘Well, then! my good sir, it appears she 
was his mistress. At least so it was said, when the affair was dis- 
cussed at the time in whispers. Now no one dares so much as 
mention it. But she was a hypocrite of the first water, was your 
Comtesse! I tell you she was born so, as a woman is born 
blonde or brunette. Falsehood she raised to a fine art, till it was 
indistinguishable from truth, so simple and natural was she 
through it all, so absolutely without effort or affectation of any 
kind. Her skill in deceiving was so masterly, nobody till quite 
lately even suspected deception was at work at all—and yet some 
rumours did leak out, that were promptly hushed up for fear of 
the very horror they excited. . . . According to these, the Scotch- 
man, whose sole passion seemed to be card-playing, was not only 
the lover of the Comtesse, who never received him at her house 
as everybody else did, and when occasion offered never failed to 
scarify him with her cruel shafts of epigram, reserving her most 
impish sarcasm for him in preference to any of her acquaintances. 
. . . He was her lover, yes; but that was not all! there was some- 
thing worse behind. The God of Tricks, it was darkly whispered, 
had tricked mother and daughter both! The unhappy child Her- 
minie adored him with a deadly, silent infatuation. Mademoiselle 


172 THE DIABOLIQUES 


Ernestine de Beaumont will tell you so, if you ask her. It was 
a fatality. Did he really love the girl? Did he love the mother? 
Did he love both? Did he love neither? Did he perhaps only 
find the mother useful to cloak the game he was playing with the 
other? ... Who can tell? this part of the tale is wrapped in 
mystery. The one thing certain is that the mother, as harsh and 
hard of soul as of body, conceived a hatred for her daughter that 
contributed not a little to hasten her untimely death.’ 

“They say that! I interrupted, more dismayed at my suspi- 
cions having proved well founded than I should if they had been 
entirely unjustified; ‘but who can really know? . . . Karkoel was 
no idle talker to boast of his successes. He was not the man to 
babble secrets. Nothing could ever be drawn from him about 
his former life; ‘was he likely to have suddenly grown talkative 
and told all the world of his relations with the Comtesse du 
Tremblay?” 

“Certainly not! replied the Chevalier de Tharsis emphatically; 
‘they made a pair, the two hypocrites. He went as he came, with- 
out giving any of us grounds for saying he was anything but a 
devoted whist-player. But, perfect as was the Comtesse’s dis- 
cretion, irreproachable the exterior she presented to the world, her 
maids, in whose eyes no mistress is a heroine, related how she 
would shut herself up alone with poor Herminie and how, after 
long hours alone together, they would come out each paler than 
the other, but the daughter always the more tearful and red-eyed 
of the two.’ 

“You know no other details, nothing certain, then?’ I said, 
to make him talk and so get more light on these obscurities. 
“Yet you know as well as I do what servants’ gossip amounts to. 
. . » We should probably learn more from Mademoiselle de Beau- 
mont.’ 

“Mademoiselle de Beaumont!’ cried Tharsis. ‘Ah! there was 
no love lost between those two, the Comtesse and Mademoiselle 
de Beaumont! they hated each other, because each had the same 
biting tongue! The survivor you will find never mentions the 


BENEATH THE CARDS 173 


dead woman but with eyes of menace and a treacherous implica- 
tion of knowing more than she cares to tell. There can be no 
doubt she takes a pleasure in insinuating the most abominable 
atrocities . . . but only really knows of one—and that can hardly 
be called atrocious—poor Herminie’s love for Karkoel.’ 

““And that is not knowing much, Chevalier,’ I broke in. ‘If 
we could hear all the secrets young girls tell each other in con- 
fidence, we should conclude every child that dreams vaguely of 
a lover to be head and ears in love. Now you will admit that 
a man like Karkoel was just the sort of romantic figure to set a 
girl dreaming.’ 

“True enough!’ returned the old Chevalier; ‘but we have some- 
thing more than girls’ confidential chatter to go upon. You will 
remember . . . but no! you were too young at the time! anyhow, 
it was much remarked upon in our little society . . . that Ma- 
dame de Stasseville, who had never shown much preference be- 
fore for anything and certainly not for flowers especially (indeed 
I defy you or any man to say what the woman’s predilections 
were), began towards the end of life to wear a bouquet of mig- 
nonette constantly at her belt, and at the whist-table and indeed 
on all occasions, was in the habit of breaking off the stalks and 
chewing them. In fact one fine day Mademoiselle de Beaumont 
actually asked Herminie, with a tinkling note of mockery in the 
tone of her voice, how long her mother had been a herbivorous 
Dana; 

“Oh, yes! I remember perfectly, I answered. And truly I 
had never forgotten the wild-beast way, at once amorous and 
cruel-looking, in which the Countess had inhaled the fragrance 
of her bouquet and chewed the flowers during that game of whist 
which had played so large a part in my boyish recollections. 

“Well! you must know,’ the old fellow went on, ‘the mig- 
nonette came from a magnificent flower-stand Madame de Stasse- 
ville had in her drawing-room. The time was quite gone by 
when strong scents had made her ill. We had seen the day when 
she could not bear them and after the last confinement, when she 


174 THE DIABOLIQUES 


had been nearly killed, she used to tell us in a languid voice, with 
a bunch of tuberoses. Nowadays she delighted in them with an 
almost passionate ardour. Her drawing-room was almost as 
stifling as a conservatory when the windows have been kept down 
till midday. Indeed two or three delicate ladies of her acquaint- 
ance left off visiting her for no other reason. It was a great and 
sudden change; but it was set down to sickness and nerves. After 
her death, when the room had to be dismantled—for her son’s 
guardian soon marched off that young scamp, who by the way is 
as rich as a fool of his sort has every right to be, to a boarding- 
school—the mignonette was transplanted to the open air, and 
they found buried beneath the roots, what do you think? . . . the 
corpse of a baby, that had been born alive...” 

The narrative was cut short at this point by a perfectly genuine 
cry of horror from two or three of the women present, albeit they 
were barely on speaking terms as a rule with the simpler and 
more natural emotions. For many a long day these had been 
quite out of their line; but I tell you, they had their revenge for 
once! The rest showed more self-control, and only gave an al- 
most convulsive start. 

“A pretty fix, and a pretty fixture!’ put in the Baron de Gourdes 
at this moment, with his usual flippancy, an amiable little rascal, 
known among his friends as “The last of the Barons”—one of 
those people who poke fun at every mortal thing, and would crack 
a joke behind a coffin, or even inside one. 

“Where did the infant come from!” added the Chevalier de 
Tharsis, kneading the contents of his tortoise-shell snuff-box. 
“Whose child was it? Did it die a natural death? Had it been 
murdered? Who was the murderer? . . . Questions all equally 
unanswerable, but giving rise to all sorts of abominable con- 
jectures exchanged in awestruck whispers.” 

“You are right, Chevalier! they are unanswerable,” I responded, 
more than ever determined to bury within my own bosom any 
more complete knowledge I believed myself to possess. “It will 
always remain a mystery—and may it grow more and more im- 


BENEATH THE CARDS 175 


penetrable till the day when it shall be utterly and entirely 
forgotten.” 

“As a matter of fact,” he returned, “there are but two living 
creatures in all the world who really know the facts, and,” he 
added with a sly smile, “it is highly improbable either of these 
will make them public. One is our friend Marmor de Karkoel, 
now gone back to the East Indies, his chest stuffed with the gold 
he has won of us. We shall never see him any more. The 
SETI os 

“What other?” I asked in astonishment. 

“What other?” he resumed, with what he intended for a wink 
of Machiavellian cunning; “we have still less to fear from the 
other. This is the Countess’s Father Confessor. You know, fat 
Abbé de Trudaine—who, by the by, has just been nominated for 
the See of Bayeux.” 

“Chevalier,” I broke in, struck by a thought which threw more 
light than anything else on the woman’s nature, which I now 
felt convinced was originally secretive rather than hypocritical, 
as a purblind observer like the Chevalier de Tharsis called her, 
merely because she had thrown the screen of a strong will over 
the indulgence of her passions, perhaps to double by that means 
the stormy satisfactions she enjoyed, “Chevalier, you are mis- 
taken. The approval of death never broke down the wall of 
reserve that barred in that stern spirit, better worthy of sixteenth- 
century Italy than of our puny modern days. I tell you the 
Comtesse de Stasseville died as she had lived. The voice of the 
priest beat in vain against the granite of her resolution, and she 
carried her secret with her to the grave. If a death-bed repent- 
ance had indeed led her to entrust it to the minister of God’s 
mercy, you may be quite sure nothing would ever have been 
found in the Comtesse’s flower-stand.” 

So ended the story. The narrator had kept his promise; he 
had told all he knew, though this was after all only the ravelled 
ends of the complete romance. A long silence followed. Each 
member of the audience was wrapped in thought, endeavouring 


176 THE DIABOLIQUES 


with what power of imagination he possessed, to combine the de- 
tached details which were all he had to go upon, and complete 
this romance of real life. In a place like Paris, where raillery 
is so quick to turn feeling out of doors, silence, in a roomful of 
clever people, after a story is the most flattering of all marks of 
success. 


“A very pretty game indeed, especially what lay beneath the 
cards!” at length remarked the Baronne de Saint-Albin, as in- 
veterate a player as any old diplomat’s wife. “What you say is 
very true! what is half seen makes a far deeper impression than 
if every card had been faced and every turn of the game exposed.” 

“Verily, truth is stranger than fiction,’ observed the Doctor 


sententiously. 


“Ah! yes, and the same thing is so true both in music and life!” 


cried Mademoiselle Sophie de Revistal eagerly. “The highest ex- 
pression of both comes far more from the silences than the 
symphonies.” 


She turned on her bosom friend, the proud impassive Comtesse 
de Damnaglia, of the unbending carriage, who sat all the while 
biting the ivory and gold tip of her fan. What said the steel- 
blue eyes of the fair Countess? . . . Well! I could not see her 
face, but her back, which was all studded with little beads of per- 
spiration, had a tale of its own to tell. It is hinted that the Com- 
tesse de Damnaglia is not unlike Madame de Stasseville in this, 
that she possesses force of character sufficient to hide under an 
unruffled exterior the fierce emotions and occult satisfaction of an 
intensely passionate nature. 


“You’ve quite spoilt for me the flowers I was so fond of,” said 
his hostess, the Baronne de Mascranny, half turning round to the 


BENEATH THE CARDS 177 
romancer. And then, decapitating a poor little rosebud she took 
from her bosom, she added, as she dreamily pulled the flower to 


pieces, with a little shudder of horror. 
“No! never again! I shall never wear mignonette again!” 





AT A DINNER OF ATHEISTS 


EVENE D 
Ne DZ 


À 


co 








AT A DINNER OF ATHEISTS 


Worthy of men who know no God 
ALLEN. 


NicuT was just beginning to fall in the streets of , but it was 
already dark in the church of that little town in Western France. 
Night always falls earlier in churches than it does elsewhere, on 
account of the small amount of light which comes through the 
stained-glass windows, and also on account of the number of 
pillars, and the shadows thrown by the arches. But the doors 
are not closed because night has fallen inside the edifice, anticipat- 
ing the close of day. They generally remain open till the Angelus 
has rung—and sometimes even very much later, as on the eve of 
great festivals; for, in pious towns, many people confess before 
taking the sacrament the next day. At no hour of the day are 
country churches more frequented by church-goers than at this 
time in the evening, when work has ceased, daylight has vanished, 
and the Christian soul prepares for the night—night which re- 
sembles death, and during which death may come. At that hour 
you fully realize that the Christian religion was born in the cata- 
combs and retains somewhat of the sadness of its cradle. Then 
it is, indeed, that those who believe in prayer like to come and 
kneel with their faces buried in their hands, in the mystery of the 
shadow of the empty nave, which responds to the deepest wants 
of the human soul; for if we worldly and passionate ones feel more 
emotion when we are alone in the dusk with the woman we love, 
why should it not be the same with religious souls and God, when 
the church is hidden in darkness, and they can whisper into His 
ear in the obscurity? 

Thus did the pious souls, who had come to offer up their eve- 

181 





182 THE DIABOLIQUES 


ning prayer according to custom, seem to be speaking to Him this 
evening in the church of In the town, still grey in the foggy 
autumn twilight, the street lamps were not yet lighted. Vespers 
were over two hours ago, and the cloud of incense smoke which 
long formed a blue screen in the room over the choir, had evap- 
orated. Deep night already unfolded its mantle of shade over the 
church, like a sail falling from a mast. Two long thin candles, 
one on each side of the nave, and the sacristy lamp, like a little 
fixed star in the darkness of the choir, threw a ghostly glimmer 
rather than a light. In this dim religious twilight it was pos- 
sible to see indistinctly, but impossible to recognize anyone. You 
could see here and there in the shadow, a few black spots, darker 
than the greyness which surrounded them, in which you could 
distinguish a few bent forms, the white caps of kneeling women, 
and one or two hoods—but that was all. You heard rather than 
saw. All those mouths praying in a low voice in the dim, sono- 
rous silence produced a curious whisper like the murmur of an 
ant-hill of souls visible only to the eye of God. ~ 

Sometimes this murmur would be broken by a sigh, or the noise 
of one of the side-doors swinging on its hinges to admit a new- 
comer—the sound of a sabot on the tiles, or a chair knocked over 
in the darkness—or from time to time there would come a cough— 
one of those coughs which the devout try to keep in out of respect 
for the holy echoes of the Lord’s house. But these noises were 
but the rapid passing of so many sounds, and did not interrupt the 
fervent worshippers in the eternal murmur of their prayers. 

The darkness explains why none of the faithful who assembled 
every evening in the church of took any notice of a man 
whose presence would assuredly have astonished more than one of 
them if there had been light sufficient to recognize him. For he 
was no frequenter of the church. He was never seen there. He 
had never put his foot inside the edifice since he had returned to 
his native town after years of absence. 

Why had he entered this evening? What feeling, or idea, or 
project, had caused him to cross the threshold of a door before 








A DINNER OF ATHEISTS 183 


which he passed several times a day without paying any atten- 
tion to it? He was a very tall man, and his pride must have 
stooped as much as his body when he passed under the little 
arched door, weather-stained by the dampness of the rainy climate 
of the West of France. There was poetry in that fiery brain! 
When he entered this unfamiliar place, was he struck by the al- 
most funereal aspect of the church? which resembles a crypt in 
its construction, for it is built below the level of the street, and 
you go down several steps on entering, so that the doorway is 
higher than the altar. He had never read the story of St. Bridget, 
but if he had read it, he would, when he entered that dark atmos- 
phere full of mysterious murmurs, have thought of that sad and 
terrible dormitory where sighs and whispers come out of the walls. 

Whatever may have been his impressions, it is certain that he 
stopped in the midst of the side-aisle as though his memory were 
at fault. It was evident that he sought someone or something he 
could not find in the deep shadow. However, when his eyes were 
accustomed to the darkness, and he could see the shapes of things 
around him, he perceived an old beggar woman, crouching rather 
than kneeling, at the end of the “paupers’ bench,” and telling her 
beads; and he touched her on the shoulder, and asked her where 
was the Virgin’s chapel, and the confessional of one of the parish 
priests whom he named. 

The old beggar woman, who for the last fifty years, had formed 
part of the furniture of the church, and belonged to it almost 
as much as the gargoyles, gave him the information he required, 
and the man threaded his way through the disarranged chairs 
which encumbered the aisle, and stood before the confessional 
which is at the end of the chapel. He remained there with his 
arms crossed—the attitude always adopted by men who do not 
come to pray, and who wish to assume a suitably respectful at- 
titude. Several lady members of the Congregation of the Holy 
Rosary, who were then praying in the chapel, would, if they had 
been able to see this man, have remarked what I will not call the 
impiety but rather nonpiety of his attitude. 


184 THE DIABOLIQUES 


Generally, on evenings when there was confession, there stood 
alight, beneath the figure of the Virgin, a twisted candle of yellow 
wax, which lighted the chapel; but nearly all the faithful had taken 
the Communion that morning, and there was no one in the con- 
fessional save the priest, who was meditating on the solitude, and 
he had come out, extinguished the yellow wax candle, and re- 
turned to his wooden box to resume his meditations in the dark- 
ness, which prevents all external influences, and thus aids medita- 
tion. Was it intentionally, or by chance, caprice, or economy, that 
the priest had performed this simple act? At any rate, it had 
saved the man who entered the chapel from being recognized 
during the few instants he was there. 

The priest saw the new-comer through the little grating in the 
door, and threw open the door, but without moving from his seat; 
and the man, unfolding his arms, handed the priest a small object 
which he drew from his breast. 

“There, Father,” he said in a low but distinct voice. “I have 
carried i¢ about me many a long day.” 

Nothing more was said. The priest, as though he understood 
the matter, took the object, and quietly closed the door of the 
confession-box. The ladies of the Congregation of the Holy 
Rosary imagined that the man who had spoken to the priest was 
about to kneel and confess, and were extremely astonished to see 
him descend the steps, treading lightly, and regain the aisle by 
which he had come. 

But if they were surprised, he was still more so when, half-way 
towards the door by which he had entered, and by which he had 
intended to leave, he was seized suddenly by a pair of strong arms, 
and a laugh, which was abominably scandalous in such a holy 
place, burst forth within two inches of his face. Happily for the 
teeth that laughed, he recognized them, being so close to his face. 

“Sacré nom de Dieu!” said the laugher in a low voice, but not 
so low but what those who were near heard the profanity. 
“What the devil are you doing, Mesnil, in a church at this hour? 


A DINNER OF ATHEISTS 185 


We are not in Spain now, as we were when we used to rumple the 
veils of the nuns of Avila.” 

The person he had called “Mesnil” made an angry gesture. 

“Be quiet!” he said in a low but commanding voice. “Are you 
drunk? You swear in a church as though you were in a guard- 
room. Go on! no foolery, and let us both get out of here de- 
cently.” 

And he quickened his steps, and passed, closely followed by 
“the other,” the small, low door, and when they were out in the 
street, and could speak out loud, “the other” said: “May all the 
lightnings of hell burn you up, Mesnil! Are you going to turn 
monk? Are you going to believe in their mummeries? You, Mes- 
nilgrand! You!—the captain of the Chamboran regiment! in a 
church, like a lubberly monk!” 

“You were there yourself!” said Mesnil quietly. 

“I went to follow you! I saw you enter, and was more as- 
tonished—I give you my word of honour—than if I had seen my 
mother violated. I said to myself: ‘What is he doing in that 
nest of priests?? Then I thought there must be some petticoat 
at the bottom of it, and I wanted to see what grisette, or what 
great lady of the town, you were after.” 
~ “No, I was about my own business, my good fellow,” replied 
Mesnil, with the quiet insolence of a supreme contempt that is in- 
tended to be evident. 

“Then I am more devilishly surprised than ever.” 

“My good fellow,” said Mesnil, stopping, “ever since the crea- 
tion of the world there have been men like me specially intended 
to astonish—men like you.” 

And turning his back, and quickening his steps, like a man who 
does not mean to be followed, he ascended the Rue de Gisors to 
the Place Thurin, in one of the corner houses of which he resided. 


He lived with his father, old Monsieur de Mesnilgrand, as he 
was called in the town when they spoke of him. He was an old 


186 THE DIABOLIQUES 


man, rich and miserly (it was asserted), “hard as a stone’ —that 
was the expression they used—who had for many years lived in 
retirement, and saw no company except during the three months 
when his son, who resided in Paris, came to stay with him. 
Then old Monsieur de Mesnilgrand, who ordinarily did not 
see so much as a cat, invited and received all old friends and 
regimental comrades of his son, and gave such good dinners 
that all the old topers and good livers of the town talked about 
them. 

He was proud of his son—but the old man was not happy, and 
had good reason. His “young man,” as he called him—although 
he was more than forty—had had his career ended by the same 
blow which had reduced the Empire to dust and destroyed the 
fortunes of him who was then known simply as The Emperor, as 
though his office and glory had obliterated his name. He had left 
home at eighteen, but he was of the stuff of which great generals 
are made, and he had fought in all of the wars which the Em- 
peror had waged, but Waterloo had ruined all his hopes. He was 
one of the men who was not taken into the army at the Restora- 
tion, for he had not been able to resist the temptation of joining 
his old commander after the return from Elba—an event which 
seemed to deprive many able men of their own free will. 

Captain Mesnilgrand—of whom the officers of that romantically 
brave regiment, Chamboran, said: “A man may be as brave as 
Mesnilgrand, but braver he cannot be”—saw many of his regi- 
mental comrades, who had not seen nearly so much service as he 
had, become colonels in all the crack regiments; and though he 
was not jealous, it was a cruel blow to him! He had an intensely 
sensitive nature. 

Military discipline—at a time when it was nearly as strict as it 
was amongst the Romans—was the only thing capable of restrain- 
ing his passions, which were so violent that eighteen years before 
they had shocked his native town, and nearly killed him. For, 
before he was eighteen, inordinate excesses with women had 


A DINNER OF ATHEISTS 187 


brought on a nervous disease, a kind of tabes dorsalis, for which 
he was obliged to have his spine burned with moxas. 

This terrible remedy, which astonished the town as much as his 
excesses had astonished it, was utilized by some of the fathers in 
the town to impress their sons, who were taken to see the opera- 
tion, in order that the spectacle might improve their morals; ter- 
ror being considered the most adequate way of attaining that end. 
They were taken to see young Mesnilgrand burnt. He survived 
the operation, thanks to possessing a constitution like iron. This 
exceptional constitution withstood the moxas, and, later, withstood 
fatigue, wounds, and all the hardships which afflict a soldier; and 
Mesnilgrand was still a strong man and less than middle-aged 
when he found the military career closed against him, and his 
sword glued to its scabbard, and that soured his temper and made 
him furious. 

To understand Mesnilgrand, one must search through history 
for a man to whom he could be compared, and we should be 
obliged to go back to the famous Charles the Bold, Duke of 
Burgundy. An ingenious moralist has explained the incongruities 
of our destinies by the theory that men resemble portraits, where- 
in some, who have only the head and bust painted, seem too large 
for their frames, whilst others are dwarfed or disappear entirely, 
owing to the immense size of their frames. Mesnilgrand, the son 
of a mere Norman squireen, compelled to live and die in the ob- 
scurity of private life, after having missed the great historic glory 
for which he was intended, experienced all the terrible force of 
long, continued fury and envenomed rage which devoured the vi- 
tals of Charles the Bold, who is also called in history, Charles the 
Terrible. Waterloo, which had thrown him out of employment, 
had been at once what Granson and Morat had been for that hu- 


1 Moxa is a peculiar form of counter-irritant practised in the East. A 
small cone of pith, or linen steeped in nitre, is placed on the skin, set 
alight and allowed to burn gradually down. It is said to be useful in 
many cases of sciatica, paralysis, etc. 


188 THE DIABOLIQUES 


man thunderbolt who found his end in the snows of Nancy. Only 
there was neither snow nor Nancy for Mesnilgrand, a cashiered 
captain. It was believed that he would kill himself or go mad, 
but he did not kill himself, and his head was too strong—he did 
not go mad. He was so already, the jokers—who are found ev- 
erywhere—said. If he did not kill himself—and considering his 
nature his friends could have asked him, but did not ask him, 
why he did not—he was not a man to let his heart be eaten by 
a vulture without an attempt to crush the vulture’s beak. Like 
Alfieri, who knew nothing except how to break horses, but learned 
Greek when he was forty, and even composed Greek verses, Mes- 
nilgrand threw himself, or rather precipitated himself, into paint- 
ing, that is to say, that which was farthest removed from him, 
precisely as a man, in order to make sure of killing himself, will 
mount to the seventh floor before throwing himself out of window. 

He knew nothing of drawing, but he became a painter, like 
Géricault, whom he had, I believe, known in the Musketeers. 
He worked as furiously as one flying before the enemy—he said 
with a bitter laugh—exhibited, made a sensation, did not exhibit 
again, destroyed his canvases after he had painted them, and set 
to work again with indefatigable zeal. This officer, who had lived 
sword in hand, and ridden all across Europe, passed his life in 
front of an easel, and was so disgusted with war—the disgust of 
those who adore—that what he chiefly painted was landscape— 
landscapes like those he had ravaged. 

Whilst he was painting them he chewed some curious mixture 
of opium and tobacco, which he smoked day and night; for he 
had had made a hookah of his own invention which he could smoke 
even whilst he was asleep. But neither narcotic, nor drugs, nor 
any of the poisons with which men paralyse or slowly kill them- 
selves, could lull to sleep the monster of fury which was never 
quieted within him, and which he called the crocodile of his foun- 
tain—a phosphorescent crocodile in a fountain of fire. Others, 
who did not know him, long thought that he was one of the Car- 
bonari. But those who knew him better were aware that there 


A DINNER OF ATHEISTS 189 


was too much talk and too much stupid liberalism about the Car- 
bonari for a man of such strong character, who estimated all the 
petty foolishnesses of his time with the shrewd perception which 
distinguishes the Normans. 

He was never deluded into joining any conspiracy. He fore- 
told the fate of General Berton. On the other hand, for the 
democratic ideas to which the Imperialists inclined during the 
Restoration that they might conspire the better, he had an in- 
stinctive loathing. He was profoundly aristocratic, and not so 
merely by birth, caste, or social rank—he was so by nature; of 
himself, and would have been the same had he been the meanest 
cobbler in the town. He was so, as Heine says, “by his manner of 
feeling,” and not like a bourgeois, like those parvenus who care 
only for external distinctions. He never wore any orders or 
medals. His father, who saw that he was upon the eve of becom- 
ing a colonel when the Empire crumbled to pieces, had bought 
for him the reversion of a barony; but he never used the title, 
and on his visiting-cards, and for all the world, he was only the 
Chevalier de Mesnilgrand. Titles, deprived of all political priv- 
ileges, or as a reward for real feats of arms, he valued no more 
than the rind of a sucked orange, and he laughed at them, even in 
the presence of those for whom they had an importance. He 
proved this one day in the little town of , which teemed with 
nobles, and where the old landed gentry, now ruined and robbed 
by the Revolution, had—perhaps to console themselves—the in- 
offensive mania of assuming the title of Count or Marquis, which 
their families—which were very ancient and did not need them— 
had never borne. Mesnilgrand, who thought such claims ridicu- 
lous, took a bold method of putting a stop to it. One evening, 
at a party given by one of the most aristocratic families in the 
town, he said to the servant: “Announce the Duc de Mesnil- 
grand.” 

And the servant, much astonished, called out in a stentorian 
voice: “The Duc de Mesnilgrand !” 

There was a general start throughout the company. 





190 THE DIABOLIQUES 


“Ma foi!” he said, seeing the effect he had produced, “as every- 
body takes a title nowadays, I thought I would take that one.” 

No one said a word; some of the jokers retired into private cor- 
ners and laughed, but they ceased to use sham titles. ‘There are 
always knights-errant in the world. They no longer redress 
wrongs with sword and lance, but they cure ridiculous presump- 
tions with satire, and Mesnilgrand was one of these knights-errant. 

He had a natural gift for sarcasm. But that was not the only 
gift that God had given him. Although force of character was 
the most prominent feature in his mental economy, his wit, though 
it took but second place, was a great source of strength to him 
against others. No doubt if the Chevalier de Mesnilgrand had 
been a happy man he would not have been very witty, but being 
unfortunate he had the opinions of the desperate, and when he 
was in good spirits, which was rarely, it was with the gaiety of 
despair; and there is nothing which so fixes the kaleidoscope of 
wit and prevents it from turning, as the fixed idea of unhappiness. 

But that which he most possessed, and was of the greatest use 
to him, considering the passions that surged within his breast, 
was eloquence. It has been said of Mirabeau, and may be said 
of all great orators: “If you had only heard him!’—and the ex- 
pression seemed specially intended for him. You should have 
seen, during any discussion, his breast dilate, and his brow, fur- 
rowed with wrinkles—like a sea, in the hurricane of his wrath— 
become paler and paler—the pupils of his eyes glaring from their 
whites, as though they would strike those to whom he spoke, like 
two burning balls. You should have seen him breathless, gasp- 
ing, his voice becoming more pathetic the more broken it became, 
irony making the foam upon his lips tremble long after he had 
finished speaking; his wrath only to revive again the next day, or 
hour, or minute like a phœnix arising from its ashes. 

In fact, no matter at what moment you touched certain chords 
in his nature which were ever on the strain, there would escape 
from them sounds which would overthrow anyone who had the 
imprudence to strike them. 


A DINNER OF ATHEISTS 191 


“He spent the evening at our house,” said a young lady to one 
of her friends, “and, my dear, he roared all the time. He is a 
demoniac. It will end by Monsieur de Mesnilgrand not being 
asked out at all.” 

Had it not been for the “bad form” of these outbreaks, which 
are not intended for drawing-rooms or the people who inhabit 
them, he might perhaps have interested young ladies by talking 
in a tone of mocking raillery. Lord Byron was very fashionable 
in those days, and, when Mesnilgrand was silent and reserved, he 
somewhat resembled one of Byron’s heroes. It was not the reg- 
ular beauty which young women of a calm temperament seek. 
He was extremely ugly, but his pale and care-worn face, under 
the chestnut hair which still looked youthful, his prematurely 
wrinkled forehead, like that of Lara or the Corsair, his broad, ° 
leopard-like nose, his blue eyes bordered with a thread of blood, 
like those of fiery racehorses, gave him an appearance which dis- 
turbed even the most flighty of the young ladies of When 
‘he was present, the most laughter-loving women mocked no more. 

Tall, strong, well-made, although he stooped a little, as though 
the existence he bore were too heavy a burden, the Chevalier de 
Mesnilgrand wore, under his modern costume, the strange air 
which you find in some old majestic family portraits. “He is a 
picture that has walked out of its frame,” said a young lady, the 
first time she saw him enter a drawing-room. 

Moreover, Mesnilgrand capped all these advantages by one 
which was better than all of them, in the eyes of young girls—he 
was always splendidly dressed. Perhaps it was the last remain- 
ing coquetry of his career of woman’s man—a remnant which 
had survived, like the last ray of the setting sun across a bank of 
clouds behind which it has set. Or it might have been a trace of 
the Oriental luxury which as an officer of the Chamboran regi- 
ment he had formerly displayed, for when he was gazetted to the 
regiment he had made his miserly old father pay eight hundred 
pounds, simply for tiger-skin housings and red boots. But the 
fact remains that no young man of Paris or London displayed 





192 THE DIABOLIQUES 


more elegance than this misanthrope, who no longer belonged to 
the world of fashion, and who, during the three months that he 
spent at , paid but very few visits, and did not repeat those. 

He lived as he did at Paris, painting all day until nightfall. 
He walked but little about the neat and charming little town, 
which has a dreamy aspect, and seems built for dreamers and 
poets, though it does not contain a single poet. Sometimes, when 
he passed down a street, a shopkeeper would say to a stranger who 
remarked his proud bearing: “That is Commandant Mesnil- 
grand,” as though Commandant Mesnilgrand ought to be known 
to everybody. If you saw him once, you did not forget him. 
His appearance struck you, as that of a man who asks nothing 
from the world always does, for if you ask nothing from the world 
you are above it, and then it will do any baseness for you. He 
never went to the cafés like the other officers who had been dis- 
missed from the army at the Restoration, and with whom he 
never failed to shake hands when he met them. Provincial cafés 
disgusted him. It was contrary to his tastes to enter one. No 
one was horrified at that. His comrades were sure to find him 
at his father’s house, and the old man, though a miser during his 
son’s absence, became a spendthrift when his son was staying 
with him, and gave feasts which were likened by the guests to 
those of Belshazzar, though they had never read the Bible. 

At these dinners he sat opposite his son, and though he was old, 
and looked like a character out of a comedy, you could see that 
the father had been in his time worthy of procreating the son of 
whom he was so proud. He was a tall, thin, old man, upright as 
the mast of a vessel, who proudly resisted the advance of age. 

Always clad in a long frock-coat of a dark colour, which made 
him look taller than he was, he appeared outwardly to have all 
the severe look of a thinker, or a man who has done with all the 
pomps and vanities of the world. He wore, and had always worn 
for many years, a cotton night-cap with a broad lilac band, but 
no joker had ever dared to laugh at this night-cap, which is the 
traditional head-dress of the Malade imaginaire. There was noth- 





A DINNER OF ATHEISTS 193 


ing comic about old Monsieur de Mesnilgrand. He would have 
checked the laugh on the lips of Regnard, and made the pensive 
look on Moliére’s face more pensive still. What the youth of 
this almost majestic Géronte or Harpagon had been was too re- 
mote for anyone to recollect. He had been (it was said) on the 
side of the Revolutionary party, although he was related to Vicq 
d’Azir, the doctor of Marie-Antoinette, but had soon changed. 
The well-to-do man, the landed proprietor, had triumphed over 
the man of ideas. But he had come out of the Revolution a 
political atheist, and had entered it a religious atheist, and these 
two atheisms combined had made him a sort of “arch-denier” 
who would have frightened Voltaire. 

He said little about his opinions, however, except to the men 
whom he invited to dine and meet his son, when he allowed to 
escape opinions which justified what was said of him in the town. 
The religious people and the nobility, of whom the town was full, 
looked upon him as an old reprobate who punished himself very 
properly by never visiting anyone. His life was very quiet. 

He never went out. The boundaries of his garden and court- 
yard were for him the ends of the world. In the winter, he sat 
in the ingle-nook of the kitchen fire-place, to which he had wheeled 
a huge arm-chair covered in reddish-brown Utrecht velvet, where 
he sat silently, much to the annoyance of the servants, who did 
not dare to speak out loud before him, and they talked to one an- 
other in a low voice, as though they were in church. In the sum- 
mer they were freed from his presence, for he kept to the dining- 
room, which was cool, and sat reading the papers or some old 
books which he had bought at an auction, and which had belonged 
to the library of some monastery; or he would sit arranging his 
receipts, at an old maple writing-table with copper corners, and 
which he had brought down in order to save himself the trouble 
of going upstairs when his tenants came—although it was not an 
article of furniture suitable for a dining-room. Whether aught— 
save the calculation of interest—passed through his mind no one 
knew. His face, with the short and rather flat nose, white as wax, 


194 THE DIABOLIQUES 


and pitted with small-pox, did not reveal his thoughts, which were 
as difficult to guess as those of a cat sitting purring by the side 
of the fire. 

The small-pox which had marked him had also reddened his 
eyes, and turned the lids inward so much that he had been obliged 
to have them cut, and as it was necessary often to repeat this hor- 
rible operation, it had rendered his sight weak, so that when he 
spoke to you he was obliged to step backwards a little and make 
an eye-shade of his hand, which gave him an air of mingled in- 
solence and pride. You certainly could not with any eyeglass give 
a more insolent stare than old Monsieur de Mesnilgrand could ob- 
tain with his trembling hand placed to his eyebrows, in order that 
he might see you better when he spoke to you. 

His voice was that of a man who has always had the right to 
command others—a voice that came from the head rather than 
the chest, as that of a man who has more head than heart—but 
he did not use it much. You might have said that he was as 
sparing of it as he was of his crown pieces. He economized it, 
but not as the centenarian Fontenelle did, when he left off talk- 
ing when a carriage passed, and resumed it when the noise had 
ceased. Old Monsieur de Mesnilgrand was not like old Fonte- 
nelle, a cracked and chipped bit of porcelain, perpetually engaged 
in surveying his chips and cracks. He was rather an old dolmen, 
solid as granite, and if he spoke little, it is because dolmens do 
speak little, like the gardens of La Fontaine. When he did speak, 
it was briefly, in the style of Tacitus. In conversation his words 
bit. His style was lapidary, and he pelted you, for he had a 
caustic wit, and the stones that he threw into other people’s gar- 
dens always hit someone. 

Formerly—like many other fathers—he had cried aloud con- 
cerning the follies and extravagances of his son, but since Mesnil 
—by that familiar abbreviation he designated his son—had been 
struck down like a Titan under the overturned mountain of the 
Empire, the old man felt for him the respect of a man who braves 


A DINNER OF ATHEISTS 195 


all the pitfalls of life, and who can admire the spectacle of human 
force crushed under the stupidity of destiny! 

He showed this in his manner, and his manner was expressive. 
When his son spoke before him, there was an air of rapt atten- 
tion on the old wan face, which looked like a moon drawn with 
a white pencil on grey paper, with a little red chalk to mark the 
eyes, reddened by the small-pox. In fact, the best proof that he 
could give of his esteem for his son Mesnil was that during his 
stay he completely forgot his avarice, though that passion rarely 
relaxes its cold grip on a man’s heart. He gave dinners such as 
only the Devil prepares for his special favourites; and indeed were 
not all the guests great favourites of the Devil? All the rascals 
and scoundrels that could be found in the town and the neigh- 
bourhood—murmured the royalists and the religiously minded, 
who were still actuated by the passions of 1815. “They must talk 
a lot of wickedness, and perhaps do it—” they added. The serv- 
ants, who were not sent away after the dessert, as at the suppers of 
the Baron d’Holbach, carried about the town all sorts of abomi- 
nable reports as to what was said at these revels, and the scandal 
became so great that the cook of old Monsieur de Mesnilgrand 
was badgered by her friends, threatened that, as long as Mesnil- 
grand was in his father’s house, the priest would not allow her to 
take the sacrament. 

In the town of there was as much horror felt over these 
feasts in the Place Thurin as the Christians felt in the Middle 
Ages for those feasts of the Jews at which they were alleged to 
profane the sacraments and cut children’s throats. 

It is true that this horror was a little tempered by an envi- 
ous longing to partake of the good things, and by various accounts 
which made the mouths of all the gourmands in the town 
water. In a little provincial town everything 1s known. The 
market is like the house with glass walls of the old Roman— 
it is a house without walls. It was known, almost within a 
partridge or a snipe, what they were going to have, and what they 





196 THE DIABOLIQUES 


had had at each weekly dinner in the Place Thurin. At these 
feasts, which generally took place every Friday, they had the 
best fish and shell-fish to be found in the market. They wick- 
edly joined together fish and meat, in order that the rule of ab- 
stinence and mortification prescribed by the Church might be the 
better transgressed. 

That was really the intention of old Monsieur de Mesnilgrand 
and his diabolical associates. It was an extra spice to their food 
to feast on a fast-day, and add a fast—a real cardinal’s fast—to 
their choice dishes. They were like that Neapolitan who said 
that an ice was delicious, but it would be much better if it were 
asin toeatit. In these impious wretches it would have been bet- 
ter had it been not one sin but many—for all those who sat at 
this table were impious—mortal enemies of the priesthood, which 
to them represented the Church—absolute and violent atheists, 
of which there were many at that time, when a peculiar form of 
atheism was very prevalent. For there were at that period many 
men of action, of intense energy, who had passed through the 
Revolution, and the wars of the Empire, and had indulged in all 
the excesses of those terrible times. Their atheism was not the 
atheism of the eighteenth century, from which, however, it had 
sprung. The atheism of the eighteenth century made some pre- 
tensions to truth and thought. It reasoned, was sophistical, 
declamatory, and, above all, impertinent. But it did not possess 
the insolence of the weather-beaten veterans of the Empire, and 
the regicide apostates of 93. We who have come after these men, 
have also our atheism; absolute, concentrated, wise, icy, and hat- 
ing with an implacable hate, and having for all religious matters 
the hate of the insect for the beam it bores into. But neither of 
these forms of atheism could give an idea of the inveterate atheism 
of the men of the beginning of the century, who being brought up 
like dogs by their fathers, the Voltairians, had plunged their hands 
up to the shoulders in all the horrors of politics and war, and the 
manifold corruptions which spring from them. 

After three or four hours of blasphemous eating and drinking, 


A DINNER OF ATHEISTS 197 


the dining-room of old Monsieur de Mesnilgrand had quite a dif- 
ferent aspect from that miserable little restaurant room in which 
a few Chinese mandarins of literature recently held a demonstra- 
tion against God at five francs a head! These were feasts of 
quite a different kind, and as they are not likely to be repeated, 
at least under the same conditions, it is both interesting and nec- 
essary to describe them here. 

All those who took part in these sacrilegious feasts are dead 
now, but at that time they were in the plenitude of life, which is 
at its highest when misfortune has amplified it. The friends of 
Mesnilgrand, the guests at his father’s house, still enjoyed all the 
active strength they had ever possessed, and they had all the more 
because they had exercised it, and drunk to excess all vices and 
pleasures. Circumstances and events had torn the breast from 
their mouth before they had time to suckle it, and left them only 
the more thirsty. For them, as for Mesnilgrand, it was “the hour 
of madness.” ‘They had not the high soul of Mesnil, that Orlando 
Furioso, whose Ariosto, if he had an Ariosto, would have needed 
the tragic genius of Shakespeare. But on their own mental level, 
and according to their own passions and intelligence, they had, 
like him, finished their lives before their death—which is not al- 
ways the end of life, and often comes long before the end. They 
were disarmed men, yet still with the strength to carry arms. 
They were not merely officers revoked from the army of the 
Loire; they had been also revoked from Life and Hope. The Em- 
pire was lost and the Revolution crushed by a reaction which 
could not keep under its foot, as Saint Michael keeps the dragon, 
all these men who had been turned out of their positions, their 
employment, and deprived of their ambition and all the benefits 
of their past life, and had drifted, powerless, defeated, and 
humiliated, to their native towns, there “to die miserably like 
dogs,” as they bitterly said. In the Middle Ages they would have 
become shepherds, freebooters, or soldiers of fortune, but you can- 
not choose the age you will live in, and their feet were entangled 
in the grooves of an imperious and ordered civilization, and they 


198 THE DIABOLIQUES 


were obliged to remain quiet, champ the bit, and eat and drink 
their own blood, and swallow their disgust! 

They certainly had the resource of fighting duels, but what are 
a few sabre-cuts or pistol-bullets to men who need deluges of 
blood enough to drown the earth to calm the apoplexy of their 
fury and resentment? You may guess then what kind of prayers 
they were likely to offer up to God when they spoke of Him, for if 
they did not believe in Him, there were others—their enemies— 
who did believe—and that was enough to make these atheists 
curse, blaspheme, and abuse whatever men hold holy or sacred. 
Mesnilgrand said of them one night, as he regarded them by the 
lurid flicker of a huge burning bowl of punch, when they were 
seated round his father’s table, that “they would make a good 
crew for a pirate vessel.” 

“Nothing would be wanting,” he added, glancing at two or 
three unfrocked priests, who were amongst the soldiers without 
uniform; “not even the chaplain—if pirates had a fancy for a 
chaplain.” 

But after the Continental blockade had been raised, and dur- 
ing the foolish epoch of peace which followed it, pirates were 
plentiful enough—it was the shipowner who was missing. 

Well! these Friday guests, who every week scandalized the town 
of , came, according to custom, to dine at Mesnilgrand’s house 
on the Friday following the Sunday on which Mesnil had been so 
brusquely accosted in the church by one of his old comrades, who 
was astonished and angry to find him there. 

This old comrade was Captain Rançonnet, of the 8th Dragoons, 
and he had, by the way, been one of the first arrivals that day, 
not having seen Mesnilgrand again all the week, and not being 
able to get over the visit to the church, and the way in which 
Mesnil had rebuffed him when he sought an explanation. He in- 
tended to relate the astounding incident of which he had been a 
witness, for the amusement of the other guests, and have the 
matter cleared up. Captain Ranconnet was not one of the worst 
of a bad lot, but he was a blusterer, and stupid in his im- 





A DINNER OF ATHEISTS 199 


piety. Although he was not a fool, he was dull-witted. The 
idea of a God annoyed him like a fly up his nose. He was, 
from head to feet, an officer of that time, with all the faults and 
all the good qualities of the time; fashioned by war and for war, 
believing in nothing but war, loving nothing but war; one of 
those dragoons who love to hear the jingle of their own spurs— 
as the old regimental song says. 

Of the twenty-five who were to dine with the Mesnilgrands that 
day, he was, perhaps, the one who loved Mesnil the best, though 
he had lost the clue to the character of his Mesnil since he had 
seen him enter a church. 

Is there any need to mention that the majority of the twenty- 
five guests were officers? But they were not all officers. There 
were doctors—the most materialistic and free-thinking doctors in 
the town; some old monks—contemporaries of old Mesnilgrand— 
who had broken their vows and escaped from their monastery; 
two or three ex-priests who said they were married, but were 
in reality living in concubinage; and, most conspicuous of all, a 
former representative of the people, who had voted for the King’s 
death. 

Redcaps or shakos—some of them thorough Revolutionists, 
others confirmed Bonapartists—they were ready to squabble and 
tear out each other’s entrails, but they were all atheists, and on the 
subject of denial of the existence of God, and contempt for all the 
Churches, the most touching unanimity reigned amongst them. 

Over this Sanhedrim of devils with all sorts of horns, presided 
the big devil in a cotton night-cap, old Mesnilgrand, the curious 
head-dress having nothing comic about it with such a wan and 
terrible face underneath it. 

He sat upright at the head of the table, like the mitred bishop 
of this Sabbat, and opposite was his son Mesnil, with a weary face 
like a lion at rest, but with the muscles around his wrinkled jaw 
ever ready to play. 

He stood out above all the others—imperially. The other of- 
ficers were old beaux of the Empire, when there were so many 


200 THE DIABOLIQUES 


beaux, and they were certainly handsome and elegant, but their 
good looks were purely physical, and their elegance soldierly. 
Although dressed as ordinary citizens, they retained the stiffness 
of the uniform they had worn all their lives. To use one of their 
own expressions, they were rather too much dressed up. The 
other guests—men of science, like the doctors, or turncoats, like 
the old monks, who were concerned about their clothes, though 
they had trampled underfoot the sacred ornaments of priestly 
splendour—all looked shabbily dressed. But Mesnilgrand was, 
as women would say, splendidly “got up.” As it was still the 
morning, he was wearing an adorable black frock-coat, and (as 
was then the fashion) a white or light cream-coloured necktie, 
spangled with almost imperceptible gold stars, embroidered by 
hand. As he was at home, he had not put on boots. His feet, 
so small and well-shaped that the beggars at the street-corner 
called him “Prince” when they caught sight of them, were en- 
cased in open-work silk socks and high-heeled pumps, such as 
were affected by Chateaubriand, who thought more of his feet 
than any man in Europe except the Grand Duke Constantine. 
His coat, which was cut by Staub, was worn open, showing off his 
sloe-coloured trousers and a plain black cashmere waistcoat with- 
out a watch-chain, for that day he wore no jewellery of any sort, 
except an old cameo of great price, representing the head of Alex- 
ander, on his necktie. You felt from his appearance and the good 
taste shown, that the artist had surpassed the soldier in him, and 
that he was not of the same race as the others, although he talked 
so familiarly with them. 

He was but the second master of the house, for his father did 
the honours—and, unless some discussion called forth his stormy 
eloquence, he spoke little at these noisy meetings—the tone of 
which was not quite in accordance with his views—and at which, 
from the time the oysters appeared, there was such a babel of 
sounds and ideas that it seemed as if one note more and the ceil- 
ing—the cork of the room—would pop off, as so many other corks 
were doing. 


A DINNER OF ATHEISTS 201 


It was at noon precisely that they sat down to table, accord- 
ing to the ironical custom of these irreverent mockers, who took 
advantage of the least thing to show their contempt for the 
Church. There is a belief in that pious Western country that the 
Pope sits down to table at midday, but that before doing so he 
blesses all the Christian world. Well! this august Benedicite ap- 
peared comic to these free-thinkers; therefore old Monsieur de 
Mesnilgrand never failed to say in a jeering way in his resonant 
voice, when the first stroke of twelve sounded from the church 
clock—and with that Voltairian smile which sometimes seemed 
to split in two his motionless moon-like face: 

“Sit down, gentlemen! Christians like us ought not to deprive 
ourselves of the Pope’s blessing!” 

And this remark, or one equivalent to it, was like a jumping- 
board for the impieties which sprung up at every turn of con- 
versation at a male dinner-party, especially of such men as they 
were. As a general rule it may be said that all dinners composed 
exclusively of men, and not presided over by the harmonizing 
grace of the lady of the house, or where there is not the peace- 
ful influence of woman to throw her grace, like a caduceus, be- 
tween the gross vanities, the loud pretensions, and the stupid, 
angry passions, and the personalities always heard at a dinner 
of men, seem inclined to end like the feast of the Lapithe and 
the Centaurs—at which there were no women either. At all 
repasts devoid of women’s society, even the most refined and 
best-bred men lose the charm of their politeness and natural dis- 
tinction—and it is not astonishing that they do so. They have 
not a gallery to play to, and they immediately adopt a tone of 
licence which is apt to become rough when wits are jarring. 
Selfishness—that unbanishable selfishness which it is the art of 
society to conceal under polite forms—causes elbows to be put 
on the table, previous to their being stuck into your ribs. And 
if it is thus with the most refined men, what was it likely to be 
with the guests of the Mesnilgrands—fire-eaters and warriors, 
most at home in Jacobin Clubs or around bivouac-fires, who al- 


202 THE DIABOLIQUES 


ways fancied themselves at the bivouac or the club, or even in 
worse places? 

It would be difficult to imagine, unless you had heard it, the 
scraps of conversation of these men, all great eaters and drinkers, 
stuffed with hot meats and heated with strong drinks, and who, 
before they came to the third course, had given loose rein to their 
tongues, and metaphorically “put their feet in the trough.” 
Their conversation was not all impiety, but that was what may 
be called the flower of their conversation. Remember that it was 
at this time that Paul Louis Courier—who might well have fig- 
ured at those dinners—wrote this phrase to stir up the blood 
of France: “The question is, shall we become monks or lackeys?” 
But that was not all. After politics, hatred of the Bourbons, the 
dark spectre of Religion, regrets for the past by these broken- 
down officers, and all the other conversational avalanches which 
rolled from one end to the other of this steaming table, there 
were other noisy and tempestuous subjects for talk. For ex- 
ample, there was woman. Woman is the eternal subject of con- 
versation of men between themselves—especially in France, the 
most conceited country on earth. They talked about women in 
general, and in particular—of women all over the world, as well 
as next door—the women of various countries these soldiers had 
visited, and in which they had victoriously flaunted their uniforms 
—and those of the town, whom they, perhaps, did not visit, but 
whom they insolently called by their Christian and surnames as 
though they knew them intimately, and about whom they spoke 
without any reserve, stripping off their reputation as they skinned 
a peach at dessert. 

All took part in this abuse of women, even the oldest, the 
toughest, and those most disgusted with females, as they cynically 
called women—for a man may give up sex love but he will retain 
his self-love in talking about women; and though on the edge 
of the grave, men are always ready to root with their snouts in 
the garbage of self-conceit. 


A DINNER OF ATHEISTS 203 


And on this occasion they had rooted up to their ears, for this 
dinner was, as regarded unlicensed talk, the hottest that old Mon- 
sieur de Mesnilgrand had ever given. In the dining-room, now 
silent, but the walls of which could have told strange tales if they 
could have spoken—there had arrived that time which comes in 
all dinners of men only, when the boasting begins—at first decent 
—then soon indecent—then unbuttoned—then without a shirt and 
without shame—and everyone related some anecdote or other. 

It was like a confession of demons! All these insolent railers, 
who could not have scoffed sufficiently at a poor monk confessing 
aloud his sins at the feet of his abbot, in the presence of all the 
Brothers of the order—were doing exactly the same thing; not to 
humiliate themselves as the monk does, but to pride themselves 
on and boast of their abominable life—and all, more or less, spat 
out their soul against God, and their spittle fell back in their own 
faces! 

But in the midst of all this flood of boastful romance of all sorts, 
there was one which seemed more—piquant shall I say? No, 
piquant is not a word strong enough—but more “spicy,” more pep- 
pery, more suited to the palates of these frenzied fools, who, in the 
way of stories, would have swallowed even vitriol. Yet the man 
who related it was, of all these devils, the coolest. He was like 
Satan’s back: for Satan’s back, in spite of the hell which warms it, 
is quite cold—so say the witches who kiss it in the Black Mass at 
their Sabbat. 

This was a certain ex-Abbé Reniant—an appropriate name— 
who, in this society on the wrong side of the Revolution, prepared 
to undo all that was done, had appointed himself of his own ac- 
cord, to be a priest without faith, and a doctor without science, 
and who clandestinely carried on practices which were suspicious, 
and—who knows?—perhaps murderous. Amongst educated peo- 
ple he did not acknowledge his business, but he had persuaded 
the lower classes in the town and the neighbourhood that he knew 
more than all the doctors with all their degrees and diplomas. 


204 THE DIABOLIQUES 


It was whispered mysteriously that he had secrets for curing peo- 
ple. Secrets—a fine word, which means everything because it 
means nothing; the battle-horse of the quacks, the sole survivors 
of the sorcerers who formerly exercised so great an influence on 
popular imagination. 

This ex-Abbé Reniant—for as he said angrily, “that confounded 
title of Abbé was like ringworm on his name, and no resin plasters 
would ever remove it!”—did not employ these secret remedies 
(which were possibly poisons) for the sake of gain: he had enough 
to live on. But he obeyed the dangerous demon of experiment, 
which begins by treating human life as a subject for its essays, 
and ends by making Sainte Croixs and Brinvilliers! 

Not wanting to have anything to do with licensed doctors, as 
he scornfully called them, he made up his own medicines, and 
sold or gave his mixtures—for he very often gave them away— 
on the sole condition that the bottles should be returned. ‘The 
rascal was no fool, and he knew how to appeal to his patients. 
He gave herbs, of I know not what kinds, infused in white wine, 
in cases of dropsy brought on by overdrinking, and to girls 
who were “in trouble’—as the peasants said with a wink—and 
these drinks removed their trouble. 

He was a man of average height, with a cold quiet look, and 
was dressed in the same style as old Monsieur de Mesnilgrand 
(but in blue), but his face, which was of the colour of unbleached 
linen, was surmounted by hair of an ugly towy colour, perfectly 
straight, and cut round his head—the only trait of the priest 
which remained. He spoke but little, and what he did say 
was brief and to the point. Cold and clean as the pot-hook of 
a Dutch chimney, at these dinners he sat at the corner of the 
table, and affectedly sipped his wine whilst the others took huge 
draughts. He was not much liked by these hot-blooded fellows, 
who compared him to the sour wine of Saint Nitouche—a vine- 
yard of their own creation. But this quiet air only added more 
flavour to his story, when he said modestly that for his part 


A DINNER OF ATHEISTS 205 


the best thing he had ever done against what Monsieur de Vol- 
taire called “the Infamy,” was that once—hang it, you do what 
you can!—he had given a packet of consecrated wafers to the 
pigs! 

At these words there was a roar of triumphant interjections, 
but above them all rose the shrill, sarcastic voice of old Monsieur 
de Mesnilgrand. 

“That was, no doubt, Abbé,” he said, “the last time that you 
gave the Communion!” and the malicious old fellow put his 
white, dry hand above his eyes in order to look at Reniant, who 
was half hidden behind his glass, between the two stalwart 
figures of his neighbours, Captain Rançonnet, red and fiery as 
a torch, and Captain Travers de Mautravers of the 6th cuiras- 
siers, who was as stiff as a limber wagon. 

“It was long after that,” replied the former priest, “and after 
I had thrown my gaberdine in the muck. It was during the 
height of the Revolution; at the time when you had come down 
here, Citizen Le Carpentier, as representative of the people. Do 
you remember a young girl of Hémevés whom you caused to 
be put in prison?—a mad woman!—an epileptic?” 

“Ah! said Mautravers; “so there was a woman mixed up 
in the affair! Did you give her to the pigs as well?” 

“You think yourself funny, Mautravers!” said Rançonnet. 
“Don’t interrupt the Abbé. Finish your story, Abbé!” 

“Oh, the story,” replied Reniant, “is soon told. I was ask- 
ing Monsier Le Carpentier if he remembered that girl. She was 
named Tesson—Josephine Tesson, if I remember rightly—a 
big, chubby young woman; and she was the cat’s-paw of the 
Chouans and the priests, who had hypnotized her, fanaticized 
her, and driven her mad. She spent her life in hiding priests. 
When there was one to be saved, she would have braved thirty 
guillotines. Ah, she hid the ministers of the Lord, as she called 
them, in her house, and everywhere else. She would have hidden 
them under her bed, or under her petticoats; and, if they could 


206 THE DIABOLIQUES 


have stayed there, she would have stuffed them—devil take me 
if she would not!—where she put their boxes of consecrated 
wafers—between her breasts!” 

“A thousand cannon-balls!” said Rançonnet, excitedly. 

“No, not a thousand, but only two, Monsieur Rangonnet,” 
said the rakish old apostate, laughing at his own joke, “but they 
were good-sized ones!” 

The joke took, and there was a general laugh. 

“A strange ciborium, a woman’s breast!” said Doctor Bleny, 
dreamily. 

“Oh, the ciborium of necessity,” replied Reniant, who had re- 
covered his phlegmatic air. “All the priests whom she concealed, 
and who were prosecuted, pursued, tracked down, and without 
a church, or sanctuary, or hiding-place, had given her their holy 
sacraments to guard, and she had hidden them all in her breast, 
believing that they would never be looked for there. Oh, they 
had thorough faith in her. They called her a saint. They made 
her believe that she was one. They unsettled her mind, and 
made her long to be a martyr. She was brave, and ardent, and 
boldly went everywhere with her box of sacramental wafers un- 
der her bib. She carried them at night, in all weathers, through 
rain, wind, snow, or fog, over abominable roads, to the priests 
who were in hiding who were absolving the dying in catimini. 
One night we took them by surprise at a farm where a Chouan 
was dying—I and a few good lads of Rossignol’s Infernal Column. 
One of our fellows, tempted by those splendid outposts of warm 
flesh, tried to take liberties with her, but she was a tough cus- 
tomer, and she printed her ten nails on his face in a way that 
would leave him marked for the rest of his life. But, bleeding 
as he was, the rascal would not let go, and he pulled out the 
box of wafers hidden in her breast. I counted a full dozen 
of hosts, which, in spite of her cries and struggles, for she rushed 
on us like a fury, I caused to be at once thrown into the pig- 
trough.” 


99 


A DINNER OF ATHEISTS 207 


He stopped—giving himself as many airs, about his feat, as a 
flea on the top of a boil. 

“You well avenged the porkers of the Gospel into whom 
Christ made the devils enter,” said old Monsieur de Mesnil- 
grand, in his sarcastic head voice. “You put the bon Dieu into 
them instead of the Devil—it was tit for tat.” 

“Did they have indigestion, Monsieur Reniant?—or was it the 
people who ate them?” asked seriously a hideous, little old man 
named Le Hay, who lent money at fifty per cent, and who used 
to say that “you should always consider whether the end jus- 
tifies the means.” 

There was a pause in the flood of blasphemy. 

“But you say nothing, Mesnil, about Abbé Reniant’s story,” 
remarked Captain Ranconnet, who was watching for an occasion 
to bring in his account of Mesnilgrand’s visit to the church. 

In fact, Mesnil had said nothing. He was sitting with his 
elbow on the table, and his cheek on his hand, listening without 
any great taste for all these abominations uttered by hardened 
sinners, and to which he had long been accustomed. He had 
heard so many in the course of his career. A man’s surroundings 
are almost his destiny. In the Middle Ages, the Chevalier de 
Mesnilgrand would have been a Crusader, burning with faith. 
In the nineteenth century, he was a soldier of Bonaparte, to whom 
his unbelieving father had never spoken about God, and who 
had lived, particularly in Spain, in the ranks of an army to which 
everything was permitted, and who had committed as many sac- 
rileges as the soldiers of the Constable of Bourbon did at the 
taking of Rome. Fortunately, surroundings are not absolutely 
fatal, except to vulgar souls and minds. With really strong 
characters there is something, though it be but an atom, which 
escapes or resists the action. This atom remained invincible in 
Mesnilgrand. 

He would have said nothing that day, and allowed to pass 
in stony indifference the torrent of blasphemous filth which surged 


208 THE DIABOLIQUES 


around him, boiling like the pitch of hell, but when he was ad- 
dressed by Rançonnet, he replied—with a drawl that was almost 
melancholy: 

“What do you want me to say? Monsieur Reniant did not 
do anything to boast of that you should admire him so much. 
If he believed that it was really God, the living God, the God 
of vengeance, whom he had thrown to the pigs, at the risk of 
being struck by lightning on the spot, on the certainty of hell 
hereafter, there would at least have been some courage about 
it—some scorn of more than death, since God, if He exists, can 
torture for eternity. 

“That would have been courageous—foolish, no doubt, but 
still courageous enough to tempt a man like you to imitate it. 
But it had not that merit, my dear fellow. Monsieur Reniant 
did not believe that those sacred hosts were God. He had not 
the least doubt on the subject. To him they were nothing but 
breadstuff, only made holy by foolish superstition, and for him, 
or for yourself, my poor Rançonnet, to empty a box of sacra- 
mental wafers into the pig-trough was no more heroic than it 
would have been to empty a snuff-box, or a packet of letter 
wafers, there.” 

“Eh! Eh!” said old Monsieur de Mesnilgrand, leaning back 
in his chair, looking at his son from under his hand, as he would 
have looked at a target to see where the shot had told.. He was 
always interested in what his son said, even when he did_ not 
share his opinions, and in this case he did. So he repeated his 
tne ht? 

“In fact, it was nothing, my poor Rangonnet,” continued Mes- 
nil, “just merely—I must use the word—swinish. But what I do 
admire, and admire exceedingly, gentlemen—though I do not 
believe in much myself—is this girl, Tesson, as you call her, 
Monsieur Reniant; who carried what she believed to be her God 
upon her bosom; who of her two virgin breasts made a tabernacle 
in all purity for this God—and who breathed, and lived, and 


A DINNER OF ATHEISTS 209 


passed tranquilly through all the dangers of life, with this brave 
breast bearing the burden of a God—tabernacle and altar at the 
same time—and an altar on which, at any minute, might have 
been poured forth its own blood. . .. You, Rançonnet—you, 
Mautravers—you, Sélune—and myself also; we have all carried 
the Emperor on our breast, for we had his legion of honour, and 
it gave us more courage in battle to have it there. But it was 
not the zmage of her God that she carried on her breast; for her 
it was the reality. It was a substantial God who could be 
touched and eaten, and whom she carried at the risk of her life, 
to those who needed that God. Well! on my word of honour, 
I call that sublime. I esteem that woman as did the priests who 
gave her their God to carry. 

“I would like to know what became of her. Perhaps she is 
dead; perhaps she still lives miserably in some corner of the 
country—but I know that if I were a Marshal of France, and I 
met her seeking her bread, her naked feet trudging through the 
mire, I would dismount from my horse and respectfully take off 
my hat to that noble woman, as though she still really carried 
God in her breast. Henri IV, when he knelt in the mud before 
the holy sacrament which was being carried to some poor per- 
son, did not feel more respect than I should in kneeling before 
that woman.” 

His cheek was no longer leaning on his hand. He had thrown 
his head back; and when he spoke of kneeling, he seemed to 
grow bigger and, like the Bride of Corinth in Goethe’s poem, to 
have risen from his chair to the ceiling. 

“The world is coming to an end!” growled Mautravers, break- 
ing a peach-stone with his closed fist, as though it had been a 
hammer. “Here is a captain of hussars talking about going 
down on his knees to a devotee.” 

“And suppose,” said Ranconnet, “that the cavalry passed over 
at full gallop to the enemy! After all, they did not make bad 
mistresses, those nuns who sing the Oremus, and eat the bon 


210 THE DIABOLIQUES 


Dieu, and think themselves damned for every pleasure they be- 
stow upon us, and which we make them share with us. But, 
Captain Mautravers, there are worse things for a soldier to do 
than wrong a few pious females; and one of them is to become a 
devotee himself, like a drowned chicken of a civilian. No longer 
ago than last Sunday, at nightfall, where do you suppose, gentle- 
men, that I caught Commandant Mesnilgrand, now present?” 

No one replied; and from all parts of the table, eyes were 
fixed on Captain Rançonnet. 

“By my sabre!” said Rançonnet, “I met him—no, not met him, 
for I have too much respect for my boots to trail them in the 
filth of their chapels—but I saw his back, slipping into the church, 
and stooping under the little, low door at the corner of the 
Place. Was I astonished?—astounded? Sacrebleu! I said to 
myself, my eyes must deceive me. But that is surely Mesnil- 
grand’s figure—What can Mesnilgrand be going to do in a 
church? The recollection came into my head of our old love- 
affairs with those cursed nuns in Spain. What, I said, hasn’t 
he finished yet? Is he still under the influence of some petticoat? 
May the Devil scratch out my eyes with his claws if I don’t see 
what this one is like! And I entered their Mass shop. . . . Un- 
fortunately, it was as dark there as the jaws of hell. I walked 
about, and stumbled over the old women who were down on 
their knees, muttering their paternosters. It was impossible to 
see, but in groping about in that infernal mixture of darkness 
and the carcases of old women praying, I caught hold of Mesnil, 
who was gliding along one of the side-aisles. But, would you 
believe it? he refused to tell me what he was doing in that con- 
founded church. That is why I denounce him now, gentlemen, 
that you may oblige him to explain his conduct.” 

“Go on! speak, Mesnil! justify yourself! Reply to Rançon- 
net!” they cried from all parts of the room. 

“Justify myself!” said Mesnil gaily. “I have no need to 
justify myself for doing what I please. You, who grumble so 
much about the Inquisition, are you not at present an inquisi- 


A DINNER OF ATHEISTS 211 


tion in another sense? I went into the church, Sunday night, be- 
cause I chose to do so.” 

“And why did you choose?” asked Mautravers; “for if the 
Devil is a logician, a captain of cuirassiers may well be also.” 

“Ah, there!” said Mesnilgrand, laughing; “I went there—who 
knows?—perhaps to confess. At all events, the door of a con- 
fessional was opened for me. But you cannot say, Rançonnet, 
that my confession lasted very long!” 

They could all see that he was laughing at them—but there 
was an air of mystery about the fun which annoyed them. 

“Confess! A thousand hells! Have you taken the plunge?” 
said Rançonnet sadly, for he took the matter seriously. Then, 
throwing himself back like a rearing horse, he cried: “No! by 
heavens! it is impossible. Look here, you fellows! can you be- 
lieve that Captain Mesnilgrand has confessed like some old 
granny, kneeling on a stool, with his nose against the grating of 
a priest’s box? I cannot get the idea of such a spectacle into 
my head! Thirty thousand bullets sooner!” 

“You are very good—I thank you,” said Mesnilgrand, with 
comic mildness—the mildness of a lamb. 

“Let us talk seriously,” said Mautravers. “I am like Ran- 
connet. I could never believe in a man of your sort doing monk- 
ish tricks. Even on their death-beds, men like you don’t jump 
like a frightened frog into a basin of holy water.” 

“I do not know what you would do on your death-bed, gentle- 
men,” replied Mesnilgrand slowly; “but as for me, before I left 
for the other world, I should like, at all events, to pack up my 
portmanteau. 

“But let us leave that on one side,” continued Mesnilgrand. 
“You are, it seems, more brutalized by war and the life we lead 
than I am. I have nothing to say about your unbelief, but as 
you, Rançonnet, particularly want to know why your comrade, 
Mesnilgrand, whom you believe to be as much an atheist as your- 
self, entered a church, I should like to tell you. There is a story 
attached to it. When you have heard it, you will understand per- 


212 THE DIABOLIQUES 


haps, even without believing in a God, why I entered that church.” 

He made a pause, as though to give more solemnity to what he 
was about to relate, and then began. 

“You were speaking about Spain, Rançonnet. It was in Spain 
that the incidents I am about to relate occurred. Many of you 
took part in that fatal war of 1808 which began the downfall 
of the Empire and our misfortunes. Those who were in that war 
will not have forgotten it—you less than anyone, Commandant 
Sélune. You have a forcible reminder on your face.” 

Commandant Sélune was seated near old Monsieur de Mesnil- 
grand, opposite to Mesnil. He was a man of military appearance 
and had more right to the nickname of Je Balafré than the Duke 
of Guise, for he had received in a skirmish of outposts in Spain, 
a terrible sabre-cut, which had split his face, nose and all, from 
the left temple to below the right ear. Under any circumstances 
this would have been a very severe wound, though one which 
would have a noble appearance on a soldier’s face, but the surgeon 
who brought together the edges of this gaping wound had been 
either clumsy or in a hurry, and had joined them badly. The 
army was on the march, and in order to get the job over, he had 
cut away part of the flesh with scissors, so that it was not a seam 
which crossed Sélune’s face, but a regular ravine. It was horrible, 
but after all it was grand. He was passionate, and when the 
blood rose to his face, the scar became red, and resembled a broad 
red ribbon across his bronzed face. “You wear,” Mesnil had said 
to him one day, “your Cross of Grand Officer of the Legion of 
Honour on your face before you have it on your breast—but be 
easy, it will come down.” 

It never did come down—the Empire finished first—and Sélune 
remained a Chevalier only. 

“Well, gentlemen,” continued Mesnilgrand, “we saw some atro- 
cious deeds committed in Spain, and even did some ourselves, 
but I do not remember having seen anything more abominable 
than that which I am about to have the honour to relate.” 

“For my part,” said Sélune, nonchalantly, with the air of an 


A DINNER OF ATHEISTS 213 


old stager who does not mean to be surprised at anything, “for 
my part I have seen eighty nuns thrown one on the other, half 
dead, into a well, after each one had first been violated by two 
squadrons.” 

“Mere brutality of soldiers,” said Mesnilgrand coolly; “but this 
was the refined cruelty of an officer.” 

He sipped his wine, and then glanced round the table. 

“Did any of you know Major Ydow?” he asked. 

Ranconnet was the only one who replied. 

“I did,” he said. “Of course I knew Major Ydow. Parbleu! 
he was with me in the 8th Dragoons.” 

“Then, since you knew him,” replied Mesnilgrand, “you must 
have known someone else. When he joined the 8th Dragoons, he 
had a woman with him.” 

“La Rosalba, called la Pudica,” said Ranconnet, “his well- 
known ” and he used a coarse word. 

“Yes,” replied Mesnilgrand pensively; “such a woman does 
not deserve the name of a mistress, even of a man like Ydow. 
The major had brought her from Italy, where, before he came 
to Spain, he had served in a reserve corps, with the rank of 
captain. As you are the only person here, Ranconnet, who knew 
Major Ydow, you will permit me to introduce to these gentlemen 
this foreign devil, whose coming made such a stir when he first 
arrived amongst the 8th Dragoons with this woman on his back. 

“He was not a Frenchman, it would seem—which was certainly 
no great loss to France. He was born I don’t know where, and 
of I don’t know whom, in Illyria, or Bohemia—I am not sure 
which. But, wherever he was born, he was so strange that he 
seemed a stranger everywhere. He was, you might imagine, the 
product of a mixture of several races. He said himself that 
his name ought to be pronounced in the Greek way because he 
was of Greek origin, and you could believe that from his ap- 
pearance, for he was handsome—perhaps too handsome for a 
soldier. A man who has such good looks is apt to take too great 
care of them, and other persons have the respect for him that 





214 THE DIABOLIQUES 


they would have for a masterpiece. Masterpiece as he was, how- 
ever, he went into battle with the others, but when you have said 
that of Major Ydow, you have said all. He did his duty, but 
he never did more than his duty. He had not what the Emperor 
called the ‘sacred fire.’ In spite of his beauty, which I willingly 
grant him, I considered him ugly, in spite of his handsome 
features. I have visited museums—to which you fellows never 
go—and found there a resemblance to Major Ydow. He was 
strikingly like the busts of Antinous, especially that one in which 
the sculptor, by fancy or bad taste, has inserted two emeralds 
for the eyeballs. But instead of white marble the Major’s sea- 
green eyes lighted up an olive face with its faultless facial angle, 
but there was something more in those eyes than the melancholy 
light of the evening star, or the voluptuousness of idleness, such 
as you see in the statues of Antinous—there was a sleeping tiger, 
which I one day saw awake! 

“Major Ydow was both dark and fair. The curly hair round 
his narrow forehead was jet-black, whilst his long and silky 
moustache was as brown as a weasel’s fur. It is said that that 
is a sign of treason, or perfidy, when the beard or moustache is 
of a different colour from the hair. Was he a traitor? The major 
might have become so later. He would, perhaps, like many 
others, have betrayed the Emperor, but he had not at that time. 
When he joined the 8th Dragoons, he was probably only false, 
and not false enough to avoid having the look of it. Was it this 
air which first caused his unpopularity amongst his comrades? 
At any rate, it is certain that he was very soon loathed by all 
the regiment. Very vain of his beauty—though for my own 
part I would rather have resembled many uglier men I knew— 
he seemed, as the soldiers said, to be fit for nothing but to be 
a mirror for a—what you called Rosalba just now, Rangonnet. 

“Major Ydow was thirty-five years of age. You can well un- 
derstand that with such good looks he pleased all the women, even 
the proudest—that is their weakness—and that Major Ydow was 


A DINNER OF ATHEISTS 215 


terribly spoiled by them, and learned all the vices one learns 
from women—but he had also some others they never taught 
him. We were certainly not monks in those days. We were all 
vicious enough—gamblers, libertines, seducers, duellists, drunk- 
ards, if need be, and spendthrifts in every way. We had no right 
therefore to be over-particular. Well! bad as we were, he passed 
for being worse than any of us. For us, there were certain 
things—not many, but there were one or two—of which, demons 
as we were, we should not have been capable. But he—it was 
said—was capable of anything. I was not in the 8th Dragoons, 
but I knew all the officers, and they spoke of him with much 
bitterness. They accused him of servility and toadying to his 
superiors. They suspected him of many things—of being a spy 
amongst others; and he even fought two duels, courageously 
enough, because of this half-expressed suspicion; but that did 
not change the general opinion. There always hung about him 
a cloud which could not be dissipated. 

“Moreover, he was not only both fair and dark—which is rare 
enough—but he was lucky at cards, and lucky with women— 
which is not the rule either. But that double good fortune cost 
him dear, for his success in both fields, and the jealousy inspired 
by his good looks—for though men pretend to be above, or 
indifferent to, considerations of ugliness, and repeat the consol- 
ing expression they have invented, that ‘a man is quite handsome 
enough when he doesn’t frighten his horse,’ they are amongst 
themselves quite as cowardly and petty-minded as women are— 
no doubt, these advantages explained the antipathy which was felt 
towards him; an antipathy which affected the form of contempt, 
for contempt is a deeper insult than hate, and hate knows that 
well. 

“Many times have I heard it half whispered that he was a 
‘dangerous rascal,’ although it would have been difficult to prove 
that he was one. And, in fact, gentlemen, even at this moment 
I am uncertain whether Major Ydow was what he was said to be. 


216 THE DIABOLIQUES 


But, by God!” continued Mesnilgrand energetically, with a strange 
horror in his voice, “what they did not say of him, and what he 
was one day, I know, and that is enough for me!” 

“It would be enough for us too, probably,” said Rançonnet, 
gaily, “but, sacrebleu! what the devil connexion is there between 
you entering a church, as I saw you enter it last Sunday night, and 
this damned major of the 8th Dragoons, who would have pillaged 
all the churches and cathedrals of Spain and the Christian world 
to make jewellery for his concubine of the gold and precious stones 
of the sacramental vessels?” 

“Keep in the ranks, Ranconnet,” said Mesnilgrand, as though 
he had been commanding his squadron, “and hold your tongue. 
Are you always going to be as hot-headed and impatient as you 
are before the enemy? Let me make my story manœuvre as I 
like.” 

“Well, then! march!” replied the fiery captain, as he tossed 
off a glass of Picardy wine to keep himself cool. 

And Mesnilgrand continued. 

“It is very probable that if it had not been for the woman he 
had with him, and whom he called his wife, although she was 
only his mistress, and did not bear his name, Major Ydow 
would have had some difficulties with the officers of the 8th 
Dragoons. But this woman, who was all that people called her, 
or she would never have taken up with such a man, prevented 
him from being sent to Coventry! I have often seen that occur 
in regiments. A man falls under suspicion or into discredit, and 
the others hold no communication with him beyond what is re- 
quired by the interests of the service, and he has no chums; no 
one shakes hands with him, and even at the café—in the hot 
and familiar atmosphere of which all coolnesses dissolve—his com- 
rades keep aloof from him with a polite reserve until he goes, 
when the constraint vanishes. Most probably that is what 
would have happened to the Major; but a woman is the Devil’s 
loadstone. Those who did not like him for his own sake, liked 
him for hers. Those who would never have offered the Major 


A DINNER OF ATHEISTS 217 


a glass of schnapps had he been without his ‘wife,’ offered it when 
they thought of her, thinking it might prove the means of getting 
an invitation, and thus meeting her. 

“There is a law of moral arithmetic written in every man’s 
breast long before a philosopher put it on paper, and that is, 
‘that it is farther from a woman to her first lover than the first 
is from the tenth,’ and I believe that axiom was truer of the 
Major’s wife than it was of anyone else. As she had bestowed 
herself upon him, she might bestow herself on another—and any- 
body might be that other! And in a very short time it was 
known throughout the regiment that there was very little pre- 
sumption in such an aspiration. All who have any skill in read- 
ing a woman, and can detect the true odour through the white 
and scented veils in which they enfold themselves, knew directly 
that Rosalba was the most depraved of all depraved women— 
the perfection of vice. 

“I am not calumniating her—am I, Rançonnet? Perhaps you 
have made love to her, and, if so, you know that there was never 
a more fascinating crystallization of every vice. Where did the 
Major find her? Where did she come from? No one dared ask 
at first, but the hesitation did not last long. The conflagration 
she lighted up, not only in the 8th Dragoons, but in my regiment, 
and also—as you may remember, Ranconnet—throughout all the 
General Staff of the expedition, soon assumed huge proportions. 
We had seen plenty of women, mistresses of officers, and following 
the regiment—if an officer could afford the luxury of a woman 
amongst his other baggage; the colonels shut their eyes to the 
abuse, or even permitted it. But we had never seen one like 
Rosalba, and had no idea of one like her. The ones we were 
accustomed to were all pretty, if you like, but all of the same 
type; bold, determined young women, almost masculine, almost 
impudént; generally pretty brunettes of a more or less passionate 
temperament, who looked like boys, and were very fascinating 
and voluptuous in the uniform that their lovers sometimes took 
the fancy to make them don. 


218 THE DIABOLIQUES 


“If the legitimate and honest wives of officers can be dis- 
tinguished from other women by some subtle characteristic which 
is common to them all, and which they derive from the military 
surroundings amidst which they live, the same may be said of 
the mistresses of officers. But Major Ydow’s Rosalba had noth- 
ing in common with the adventuresses or camp-followers to whom 
we had been accustomed. To begin with, she was a tall, pale 
young girl—but she did not long remain pale, as you will hear 
—with a mass of fair hair. That was all. Nothing to make a 
great fuss about. Her skin was not whiter than that of other 
women who have fresh and healthy blood under their skin. Her 
fair hair was not of that wonderful colour which has the metallic 
sheen of gold, or the tender tints of amber, which I have seen 
in some Swedish women. She had a classical face—what you 
might call a cameo face—but its passive correctness did not dif- 
fer from that of many others who are the delight and annoyance 
of passionate lovers. Whether you cared for her or not, you 
were bound to confess that she was a pretty woman. But the 
love philtres she gave men to drink had nothing to do with her 
beauty. They came from elsewhere. They were where you 
would never guess in this monster of lubricity who dared to call 
herself Rosalba—who dared to bear the spotless name of Rosalba, 
which should only be borne by innocence, and who, not satisfied 
with being Rosalba—the White Rose—called herself as well, over 
and above, ‘Pudica, the Modest.’ ” 

“Virgil also called himself the modest, and he wrote Corydon 
ardebat Alexim,’ remarked Reniant, who had not forgotten his 
Latin. 

“And it was not in irony,” continued Mesnilgrand. “The name 
of Rosalba was not invented by us, but we read it in her face 
when we first saw her, where Nature had written it with all the 
roses at her command. La Rosalba was not merely astonishingly 
modest, she was Modesty itself. If she had been as pure as the 
virgins in heaven, who, perhaps, blush when the angels look at 
them, she would not have been more the incarnation of modesty. 


A DINNER OF ATHEISTS 219 


Who said—it must have been an Englishman—that the world 
was the work of a Devil gone mad? It must surely have been 
that Devil who had created Rosalba to give men pleasure—A 
Devil who knew how to mingle voluptuousness with modesty, and 
modesty with voluptuousness, and spice them with a celestial 
condiment, and make the most infernal hotch-potch of delights 
a woman can bestow on mortal man. 

“The modesty of Rosalba was not merely in the expression of 
her face, though that would have upset all Lavater’s theories. 
No; with her, modesty was not only on the surface, it flowed in 
her blood, and was not only skin-deep. Nor was it assumed out 
of hypocrisy. The vices of Rosalba had never rendered that 
homage, or any other, to virtue. It was really a truth. La 
Rosalba was as modest as she was voluptuous, and strange to say 
she was both at once. When she said or did the most daring 
things, she had an adorable way of saying ‘I am ashamed,’ which 
I fancy I can still hear. And—an unheard-of phenomenon—in 
a love-affair with her, you were always at the beginning, even 
after you had come to the end. She would have left an orgy of 
bacchantes with the air of a maiden who commits her first sin. 
Even in the woman steeped, worn out, half dead with vice, there 
was the troubled confusion, and the blushing charm of the virgin. 
. .. I could never make you understand the delightful effect of 
these contrasts on one’s heart—language would fail to express 
that.” 

He stopped, and thought, and all the others remained lost in 
thought. It seemed as though his words had transformed into 
dreamers all these soldiers who had been under fire of every 
sort, these debauched monks, and old doctors, and brought back 
to them visions of their old life. Even the impetuous Ranconnet 
did not speak. He was dreamy. 

“You must understand,” continued Mesnilgrand, “that this 
phenomenon was not known at first. When she first came to the 
8th Dragoons, we saw nothing but a very pretty girl; of the same 
kind as Princess Pauline Borghese, the Emperor’s sister—whom 


220 THE DIABOLIQUES 


she greatly resembled, by the way. Princess Pauline had that 
ideally chaste look, and you know—what she died of. But Pau- 
line had not enough modesty to give a rosy tint to the smallest 
part of her charming body, whilst La Rosalba had enough to dye 
scarlet every part of hers. The naive remark of astonishment 
of Pauline Borghese when she was asked how she could pose 
nude before Canova—‘But the studio was warm! There was a 
stove!’—La Rosalba would never have uttered. If you had ad- 
dressed the same question to her, she would have fled, hiding her 
face, divinely purple, in hands divinely pink. But be sure that, 
as she fled, there would have lurked in one of the folds of her 
robe all the temptations of hell. 

“Such was Rosalba, whose virginlike aspect deceived us all 
when she arrived in the regiment. Major Ydow might have 
presented her to us as his legitimate wife, or even his daughter, 
and we should have believed him. Although her limpid blue 
eyes were beautiful, they were never more beautiful than when 
they were cast down. The lids were more expressive than the 
look. ‘To us men—who had spent our time in war, or with women, 
and what women!—this strange creature caused a new sensation. 

“It was vulgarly, but forcibly, said of her that ‘she might have 
gone straight to God without confessing.’ ‘What a confoundedly 
pretty girl!” whispered the old stagers; ‘but what an affected 
minx! How does she manage to make the Major happy? He 
knew, but he did not tell. 

“He drank his happiness in silence, like those true drunkards 
who drink alone. He never told of the secret happiness which 
made him faithful and discreet for the first time in his life—him! 
the Lauzun of the garrison, the most pompous and conceited of 
men, and who, when at Naples—said officers, who had known him 
there—was called the drum-major of seduction. The good looks, 
of which he was so proud, might have brought all the daugh- 
ters of Spain to his feet, and he would not have raised a single 
one of them. 

“At that time we were on the frontier between Spain and 


A DINNER OF ATHEISTS rie 


Portugal, with the English in front of us, and we occupied the 
not much less hostile border towns of King Joseph. Major Ydow 
and La Rosalba lived together as they would have done in a 
garrison town in time of peace. You remember that stubborn 
war in Spain, furious yet slow, which was not like any other war, 
for we did not fight solely for conquest, but to plant a new 
dynasty, and a fresh order of things in a country which must be 
first conquered. You all remember that between these stub- 
bornly fought fields there were long pauses, and that, in the in- 
tervals, we gave, in the part of the country we held, fétes, to 
which we invited all the most afrancesadas of the Spanish 
women. It was at these fêtes that the wife of Ma‘or Ydow, who 
had been already much noticed, became celebrated. She shone 
amidst the dark daughters of Spain like a diamond on a jet 
fringe. It was then she first began to exercise on men all those 
fascinations which composed her devilish nature, and made her 
the most depraved of courtesans, with the look of the most heav- 
enly Madonna of Raphael. 

“The passions she aroused continued to burn and spread. In 
a short time everyone was under her thrall, even the generals 
who were old enough to be prudent—all were smitten with La 
Pudica, as they liked to call her. Everyone had pretensions to 
her, and duels were fought about her, as was sure to be the case 
amongst high-spirited men who had always their sword in hand. 
She was the sultan of these terrible odalisques, and threw her 
handkerchief to anyone who pleased her—and many pleased her. 

“As for Major Ydow, he let her say and do what she liked. 
Was he too conceited to be jealous, or, knowing he was hated and 
despised, did he enjoy, in the pride of possession, the passions 
which the woman of whom he was the master, inspired in his 
enemies? It was hardly possible that he failed to notice anything. 
I have sometimes seen his emerald eyes turn dark as carbuncles 
when he saw some officer, who was suspected of being the favoured 
lover of his better half at the moment—but he restrained himself. 
And as everybody always thought the worst possible about him, 


222 THE DIABOLIQUES 


his calm indifference, or voluntary blindness, was imputed to the 
most unworthy motives. It was thought that his wife was not 
so much a pedestal for his vanity as a ladder for his ambition. 

“That was said—as things of that sort are said—but he never 
heard it. I, who had my reasons for observing him, and who 
deemed that the hate and scorn which were heaped upon him 
Were unjust, often asked myself whether there were more weak- 
ness than strength, or more strength than weakness, about the 
sombre impassiveness of this man, who was daily betrayed by 
his mistress, and who never showed the bites of jealousy. By 
heaven! gentlemen, we have all known men so hypnotized by a 
woman as still to believe in her when everything accuses her, 
and who, instead of revenging themselves, when the absolute 
certainty of treason is brought home to their souls, prefer to hide 
in the happiness of cowardice, and draw over their head the 
coverlet of ignominy! 

“Was Major Ydow such a man? Perhaps. Certainly La 
Pudica was capable of having reduced him to that degrading con- 
dition of fanaticism. The mythological Circe, who changed men 
to brutes, was not to be compared to this Virgin-Messalina. With 
the passions that burned in her heart, she was soon compromised 
in the eyes of all the officers (who were not very particular about 
women), but she never compromised herself. 

“This distinction must be borne in mind. She never by her 
conduct gave anyone a hold over her. If she had a lover, it 
was a secret between her and her alcove. Major Ydow had not 
the ghost of a chance of making even the pretence of a scandal. 
Did she love him, perchance? She lived with him, and she could 
surely, if she had wished, have linked her fortunes to another. 
I knew a Field Marshal who so doted on her that he had his 
baton made into an umbrella-handle for her. There are women 
who love—not their lover, though they love him as well. The 
carp regret their mud, said Madame de Maintenon. La Rosalba 
did not want to regret hers, so she never came out of it—and I 
fell into it. 


A DINNER OF ATHEISTS 223 
“You all know the song which was sung last century: 


When Boufflers came to Court, 
With love she made all burn. 
And each one had her in his turn. 


“And I had her in my turn. I have had women by the gross. 

“But I very much doubt if there was one like Rosalba amongst 
them all. The mud was a paradise. I am going to give you 
an analysis of my feelings, as a novelist would. I was a man of 
action, sensual in love-affairs, like Comte Almaviva, and I did 
not love her in the elevated and romantic sense of the word. 
Neither soul, intellect, nor vanity counted for anything in the kind 
of happiness she lavished on one, but the happiness had nothing 
of the lightness of a passing fancy. I had not supposed sen- 
suality could be so profound. It was the most profound of 
sensualities. Ah! the body of that woman was her only soul. 
And with that body she one evening gave me a pleasure that 
will enable you better to judge of her than anything I can say 
about her. Yes, one evening she had the boldness and indecency 
to receive me when her only costume was a thin, transparent In- 
dian muslin—a mist, a vapour, through which you saw her body, 
the shape of which was its only purity, and which was dyed with 
the deep vermilion of voluptuousness and modesty. May the 
Devil take me if she did not resemble a statue of living coral be- 
neath this white mist. Since that time, I do not care that for the 
whiteness of other women.” 

And Mesnilgrand flicked a bit of orange-peel up to the ceiling 
over the head of Representative Le Carpentier, who had helped 
to bring low the head of a king. 

“Our amour lasted some time,” he continued, “but do not im- 
agine that I wearied of her. I did not weary of her. Into sensa- 
tion, which is finite, as the philosophers say in their abominable 
jargon, she imported the infinite. No; if I left her it was for rea- 
sons of moral disgust—of pride for myself and scorn for her—for 


224 THE DIABOLIQUES 


in her most lascivious embraces I could not believe that she loved 
me. 

“When I asked her: ‘Do you love me?’—that question which 
it is impossible not to ask, even with every proof given you that 
you are loved—she would reply: ‘No,’ or shake her head in a 
puzzling manner. She wallowed in modesty and shame, and re- 
mained beneath them as impenetrable as the Sphinx. Only the 
Sphinx was cold, and she was not. 

“Well, this impenetrability, which irritated and annoyed me, 
followed by the certainty I had that she indulged in as many 
amours as Catherine II, formed the double cause why I pulled 
myself up short with a strong curb, and tore myself from the 
seductive arms of this woman. I left her—or rather I never went 
back to her. But I preserved my opinion that there could never 
be another woman like her, and that thought made me easy, and 
even indifferent to all other women. But she put the finishing 
touch to me, as an officer. After I left her, I thought of nothing 
but my military duties. She had dipped me in the Styx.” 

“And you became quite an Achilles,” said old Monsieur de 
Mesnilgrand, proudly. 

“I do not know what I became,” continued Mesnilgrand, “but 
I know that after our separation, Major Ydow—who was on the 
same terms with me that he was with the other officers of the 
Division—told us one day at the café that his wife was pregnant, 
and that he soon expected the happiness of being a father. At 
this unexpected news, some looked at one another, others smiled, 
but he noticed nothing, or, if he did, paid no attention, being prob- 
ably resolved to resent nothing but a direct insult. When he had 
left, ‘Is the child yours, Mesnil? whispered a friend in my ear, 
and in my conscience a secret voice, better informed than his, 
put the same question to me. I did not dare to reply. La 
Rosalba, even in our most confidential interviews, had never said 
a word to me about this child, which might be mine, or the 
Major’s, or someone else’s.” 


b 


A DINNER OF ATHEISTS 225 


“The child of the regiment,” broke in Mautravers, as though he 
were delivering point with his cavalry sabre. 

“Never,” Mesnilgrand went on, “had she made the least allu- 
sion to her pregnancy—but what was there astonishing in that? 
La Pudica was, as I have said, a Sphinx, who devoured pleasure 
silently, and kept her secret. No heart or affection ever filtered 
through her corporal frame, which was only open to pleasure, and 
in whom modesty, no doubt, was the first fear, the first trembling, 
the first faint spark of pleasure. To learn that she was pregnant 
had a curious effect upon me. We must agree, gentlemen, now 
that we are past the bestial period of passion, that there is some- 
thing terrible about these partnerships in paternity—this shared 
platter—and that is the loss of all paternal feeling; the terrible 
anxiety—which prevents you from hearing the voice of nature, 
and chokes it in a doubt from which there is no escape. You 
say to yourself: ‘Is this child mine?” 

“Uncertainty pursues you, as a punishment for your share in 
the transaction—the shameful partnership in which you are in- 
volved! If you had a heart, and you thought for long on this 
question, you would go mad; but life, with all its powerful in- 
terests and frivolities, carries you away on its flood, like the cork 
float of a broken line. 

“When I had heard this statement made by Major Ydow, the 
paternal instinct I had first felt, died away.—lIt is true that a few 
days later I had something else to think of than La Pudica’s 
baby. We fought at Talavera, and Major Litan of the 9th Hus- 
sars was killed in the first charge; so I was obliged to take com- 
mand of the squadron. 

“The battle of Talavera only embittered the war. We were 
more often on the march, more harassed by the enemy, and natu- 
rally there was less talk about La Pudica amongst us. She fol- 
lowed the regiment in a wagon, and it was there, it was said, that 
she was delivered of a child, which Major Ydow, who believed 
himself to be the father, loved as though it had really been his. 


226 THE DIABOLIQUES 


At least, when the child died, for it died some months after its 
birth, the Major evinced deep grief, and was almost beside him- 
self. He was no longer laughed at in the regiment. For the first 
time, the antipathy of which he was the object was stilled. He 
was pitied much more than the mother, who, if she wept for her 
offspring, still continued to be the Rosalba we all knew, that 
harlot of the Devil’s own make, who had, in spite of her vices, 
preserved the almost miraculous faculty of being able to blush to 
her backbone two hundred times a day. Her beauty did not di- 
minish. It resisted all wear and tear. And yet the life she was 
leading was calculated, if it had lasted, to have made her ‘as 
worn out as an old saddle-cloth as they say in the cavalry.” 

“Tt didn’t last? You know then what became of that of 
a woman?” asked Ranconnet, breathless with excitement, and for- 
getting for a minute the visit to the church he was so anxious to 
have explained. 

“Yes,” said Mesnilgrand, concentrating his voice as though he 
had reached the climax of his story. “You believed, as every- 
body else did, that she sunk with Ydow in the storm of war, and 
those events in which so many of us were scattered and disap- 
peared. I will tell you the fate of Rosalba.” 

Captain Ranconnet put his elbows on the table, and listened 
attentively, holding his glass in his big hand as though it had been 
the hilt of his sabre. 

“The war did not cease,” continued Mesnilgrand. “The pa- 
tient fury of the Spaniards, who took five hundred years to drive 
out the Moors, would have taken as long to drive us out. We 
could not advance through the country without examining every 
step we took. Every village we took we fortified, and turned it 
into a weapon against the enemy. The little town of Alcudia, 
which we had taken, was our garrison for some time. A large 
convent there was transformed into a barrack, but the staff was 
lodged in private houses in the town, and Major Ydow had that 
of the alcalde. As this was the largest house in the town, Major 
Ydow often received the officers there, for we kept to ourselves 





A DINNER OF ATHEISTS 227 


now. We had broken off all relations with the afrancesados, mis- 
trusting them, as the hatred of the French was on the increase. 
At these meetings, which were sometimes interrupted by the fir- 
ing of the enemy and a brush with our outposts, La Rosalba did 
the honours; always with that incomparably chaste air, that 
seemed to me a joke of the Devil. 

“She chose her victims, but I never troubled about my succes- 
sors. I had torn myself away from her, and I did not drag be- 
hind me what someone or other has called the broken chain of 
lost hopes. I felt neither spite, jealousy, nor resentment. I was 
interested, but as a spectator only, in the doings of this woman, 
who concealed the most impudent vices under the most charm- 
ing affectation of innocence. 

“I used to go to her house, and before other people she spoke 
to me with the simplicity and almost the innocence of a young 
girl you meet by accident at a well or in a wood. She no longer 
intoxicated me, turned my head, or set my senses on fire—all those 
terrible symptoms had passed. I looked upon them as having 
melted away and disappeared. But I could not, whenever I saw 
that scarlet flush suffuse her face for a word or a look, help think- 
ing of a man who sees, in his emptied glass, the last drop of the 
rosy champagne he has been drinking, and who pours on his 
thumb-nail the last forgotten drop. 

“One evening, I was alone with her. I had quitted the café 
early, and had left all the officers there playing cards or billiards, 
and gambling heavily. It was evening, but an evening in Spain, 
when the hot sun had scarcely torn itself away from the sky. I 
found her hardly clad, with her shoulders and arms bare—those 
beautiful arms I had so often bitten, and which under certain 
emotions that I had caused sometimes, assumed what artists call 
the ‘tone’ of the inside of a strawberry. Her hair, charmingly 
disordered by the heat, fell thickly over her delicately tinted neck, 
and this dishevelled, negligent, languorous air made her look 
beautiful enough to have tempted Satan and revenged Eve. 

“She was half reclining on a couch, and was writing. No 


228 THE DIABOLIQUES 


doubt what La Pudica wrote was an assignation for some lover— 
some fresh infidelity to Major Ydow, who swallowed them all as 
she devoured pleasure—in silence. When I entered, the letter was 
written, and she was melting the wax in the flame of a candle—a 
blue wax sprinkled with silver, which I seem to see still, and you 
will learn directly why that blue wax streaked with silver has 
lingered so long in my memory. 

“Where is the Major? she asked, when she saw me enter; and 
she had already put on a troubled air—but then she always had a 
troubled air, this woman who flattered men’s conceit by always 
appearing to tremble before them. 

“He is playing heavily this evening,’ I replied, laughing and 
looking longingly at the pink tint which suffused her face; ‘but I 
have other desires this evening.’ 

“She understood me. Nothing surprised her. She lit up the 
fires of desire in all men, on every occasion. 

““Bah!’ she said slowly, though the carnation tint I so adored 
on her lovely and abominable face grew deeper at the thought 
my words occasioned. ‘Bah! your desires soon pass away!’ 
And she pressed the seal on the burning wax—the flame died 
out, and the wax hardened. 

““Look! she said with provoking insolence; ‘that is like you 
men. A moment ago it was burning, and now it is cold!’ 

“As she said this, she turned the letter, and bent over it to 
write the address. 

“Must I keep on repeating that I was not jealous of this woman? 
—but we are all the same. In spite of myself, I wished to see to 
whom she was writing, and to do that, as I was still standing, I 
leaned over her head, but could not see because of her shoulders, 
and that intoxicating velvety space between them which I had so 
often kissed; and, magnetized by the sight, I could not help add- 
ing one kiss the more, and the sensation prevented her from writ- 
ing. She raised her head, which was bending over the table, as 
though she had been touched with a red-hot iron, and throwing 
herself back on the couch, gazed at me with that mixture of desire 


A DINNER OF ATHEISTS 229 


and confusion which was her great charm, her eyes raised and 
turned to me, and as I was standing behind her, I was obliged to 
bestow upon the moist, pink, half-opened mouth a kiss as warm 
as that I had just let fall between her shoulders. 

“Sensitive as she was, she had the nerves of a tiger. 

“Suddenly she sprung to her feet. 

The Major is coming upstairs,’ she said. ‘He must have lost, 
and he is jealous when he has lost. There will be a terrible 
scene. Go in here! I will get rid of him!’ and she opened the 
door of a large cupboard in which her dresses hung, and pushed 
me in. I suppose there are few men who have not some time or 
other been put in a cupboard, when the husband or protector ar- 
rived on the scene.” 

“You were lucky to have a cupboard,” said Sélune. “I had 
once to get into a coal-sack. That was before my damned wound, 
of course. I was in the White Hussars then. You may guess 
what state I was in when I came out of my coal-sack.” 

“Yes,” continued Mesnilgrand bitterly, “that is one of the draw- 
backs of adultery. At such a time even the most high-spirited 
man loses his pride, and, in generous consideration for a fright- 
ened woman, becomes as cowardly as she is, and commits the 
cowardice of hiding himself. 

“It made me feel sick to find myself in a cupboard, in my 
uniform, and with my sabre at my side, and covered with ridicule, 
for a woman who had no honour to lose, and whom I did not love. 

“But I had not much time to reflect upon my mean conduct in 
hiding myself there like a school-boy in a dark cupboard. The 
touch of her dresses as they brushed against my face seemed to 
intoxicate me. What I heard was sufficient to dissipate all volup- 
tuous sensations; the Major had come in, and, as she had guessed, 
was in a very bad humour, and, as she had also said, had a 
jealous fit, and a jealousy all the more explosive because he con- 
cealed it from us. Suspicious and angry as he was, his eye prob- 
ably fell on the letter which remained on the table, and which my 
two kisses had prevented La Pudica from addressing. 


230 THE DIABOLIQUES 


“What is that letter?” he said, roughly. 

“A letter for Italy,’ replied La Pudica quietly. 

“He was not deceived by this quiet reply. 

“That is not true!’ he said rudely, for there was no need to 
scratch the Lauzun in this man to find the free-lance, and I un- 
derstood at once what kind of life these two led together. From 
inside the cupboard, I could hear all that went on, though I could 
fancy their actions from their words, and the intonation of their 
voices. The Major insisted on seeing this unaddressed letter, 
and La Pudica, who had possession of it, obstinately refused to 
show it to him. Then the Major tried to take it by force. I 
could hear that a struggle was going on between them, but, as you 
may suppose, the Major was stronger than his wife. He got hold 
of the letter, and read it. It was to give a rendezvous to one of 
her lovers—to offer him a happiness he had already enjoyed. 
But the lover was not named. Absurdly curious, like all jealous 
men, the Major sought in vain for the name of the man who had 
deceived him. And La Pudica was revenged for having had the 
letter taken away from her, and her hand bruised, and perhaps 
bleeding, for I heard her cry during the struggle: ‘You have hurt 
my hand, you wretch!’ 

“Mad at not being able to learn the truth, and defied and 
mocked by this letter, which only told him one thing, that she had 
a lover—a lover the more—Major Ydow fell into one of those 
rages which dishonour a man, and loaded La Pudica with insults 
that a bargee might have used. I thought that he was about to 
strike her. The blows did indeed come, but a little later. He 
reproached her—and in what terms!—with being—what she was. 
He was brutal, vile, revolting, and to all this fury she replied like 
a woman who cares little or nothing; who understands thoroughly 
the man to whom she is linked, and knows that their life, in their 
own lair, must be a continual battle. 

“She was not so base, but more atrocious, more insulting, and 
more cruel in her coolness than he was in his anger. 

“She was insolent, ironical, laughing with the hysterical laughter 


A DINNER OF ATHEISTS 2a 


of hate, at the most acute paroxysms of his wrath, and replying 
to the torrent of abuse which the Major vomited forth, with those 
remarks which women know how to make when they want to 
drive us mad, and which to an angry man are like a hand- 
grenade falling into a powder-magazine. Of all her coolly insult- 
ing words, the one with which she most often pricked him was 
that she did not love him—that she had never loved him. 
‘Never! never! never!’ she repeated with a joyous fury, as though 
the declaration made her heart bound with joy. 

“Now, nothing could have been more painfully cruel to this 
conceited ass, whose good looks had done so much execution 
amongst women, and whose affection for her was overtopped by 
his vanity, than this idea that she had never loved him. He could 
no longer bear the stings of this oft-repeated insult that she had 
never loved him, and obstinately refused to believe it. 

“And what about our child?’ he foolishly asked, as though he 
had reminded her of a convincing proof she was not telling the 
truth. 

“Ah, our child! she replied with a burst of laughter. ‘It was 
not yours!’ 

“I can imagine the expression in the Major’s green eyes, 
when I heard the choked cry like that of a wildcat. He uttered 
a terrible oath. 

““Whose was it, then, cursed harlot?’ he asked with something 
that was no longer a voice. 

“But she continued to laugh like a hyena. 

“You shall never know,’ she replied teasingly. And she 
lashed him with this ‘you shall never know,’ a thousand times re- 
peated, a thousand times inflicted on his ears, and when she was 
tired of saying it, she—would you believe it!—sang it as a refrain. 
Then, when she had made him spin like a top in the spirals of 
anxiety and uncertainty, under the lash of this word, and the man, 
beside himself with wrath, was in her hands but a puppet she was 
about to break; when with cynical hate she had named all her 
lovers, nearly every officer there was, ‘I have had them all she 


232 THE DIABOLIQUES 


cried, ‘but they have none of them had me. And that child you 
are ass enough to think yours is the child of the only man I ever 
loved—T ever idolized. You haven’t guessed who he is? You 
cannot guess who he is? 

“She lied. She had never loved any man. But she knew that 
this lie was a deadly stab, and she cut and slashed him with this 
lie, till tired of being the executioner of such a victim, she finished 
by driving into his heart, up to the hilt, this last avowal. 

“Well, as you can’t guess, cudgel your brains no longer, poor 
fool! It is Captain Mesnilgrand?’ 

“Probably this was another lie, but my own name struck me 
like a bullet coming through the door. After she had pronounced 
my name, there was complete silence. Has he killed her instead 
of replying? I said to myself, when suddenly I heard the splinter- 
ing crash of a glass that had been thrown on the floor, and had 
broken into a thousand pieces. 

“I have told you that Major Ydow felt a deep, paternal affec- 
tion for the child he believed to be his, and his grief at the child’s 
death had been long and lasting. As we were soldiers on a cam- 
paign, it was impossible for him to erect to his son a tomb and 
visit it every day—the idolatry of the grave—but the Major had 
caused his son’s heart to be embalmed, in order that he might 
carry it about with him everywhere, and had the heart enclosed in 
a glass vase which generally stood on a bracket in his bedroom. 
It was this vase which was now shattered in pieces. 

“Ah, it was not mine, miserable whore!’ he cried; and I heard 
him grind the glass under his feet, and stamp upon the heart he 
had believed to be that of his son. No doubt she tried to pick it 
up, to—to save it from his fury—for I heard her throw herself 
upon him, but with the sound of the struggle there mingled an- 
other sound—that of blows. 

“Well, if you want it, there is your brat’s heart, shameless 
‘drab! said the Major. And he beat her face with the heart he 
had so much adored, and even threw it at her head as a missile. 
‘Deep calls unto deep,’ they say. Sacrilege created sacrilege. 


A DINNER OF ATHEISTS 233 


“La Pudica, beside herself with passion, did what the Major had 
done. She threw back at his head the child’s heart, which, per- 
haps, she would not have done had it been really his—the off- 
spring of the man she execrated, to whom she wished to render 
torture for torture, ignominy for ignominy. Surely this must 
have been the first time that such a sight was ever beheld by 
human eye! a father and a mother throwing in each other’s faces 
the heart of their dead child! 

“This impious combat must have lasted some minutes. It was 
so astonishingly tragic that I was unable to think of putting my 
shoulder to the door, bursting it open, and interfering, when a 
cry such as I have never heard, nor you either, gentlemen—and 
yet we have heard some frightful enough on the field of battle— 
gave me the strength to break open the door, and I saw—what 
I shall never see again. 

“The Major had pushed down La Pudica on the table where 
she had been writing, and held her with a grip of iron. All her 
clothes had been torn off in the struggle, and her beautiful, naked 
body twisted like a wounded snake beneath his grasp. 

“But what do you think he was doing with his other hand, gen- 
tlemen? The writing-table, the lighted candle, the wax lying by 
the side—all these had given the Major an infernal suggestion— 
that of sealing his wife as she had sealed the letter—and he was 
steadily carrying out this terribie vengeance of a perversely 
jealous lover! 

“‘Be punished where you have sinned, miserable woman!’ he 
cried. 

“He did not see me. He was bending over his victim, who no 
longer cried out, and it was the pommel of his sabre that he was 
using as a seal to press the burning wax. 

“T rushed towards him: I did not even tell him to defend him- 
self, and I plunged my sabre up to the hilt in his back between 
the shoulders, and wished I could have plunged my hand and arm 
as well as my sword through his body that I might have killed 


him the more surely.” 


234 THE DIABOLIQUES 


“You did well, Mesnil,” said Commandant Sélune; “a scoun- 
drel like that did not deserve to be killed in front, like one of us.” 

“Why, it was the fate of Abelard—changed to Heloise,” re- 
marked Abbé Reniant. 

“A fine surgical case,” said Doctor Bleny, “and rare.’ Mesnil- 
grand was too excited to notice these remarks. 

“He fell dead,” he continued, “on the body of his fainting wife. 
I tore him away, threw down his body, and kicked the carcass. 
The shriek that La Pudica had given—wild as that of a she-wolf— 
and which still rings in my ears—brought the maid to the door. 
‘Run for the surgeon of the 8th Dragoons!’ I cried, ‘there is 
some work for him to-night.’ But I had no time to wait for the 
surgeon. At that moment the bugles rang out the alarm, and 
called us to arms. The enemy had crept up silently and surprised 
our sentinels. I sprang to my horse, but before I left I threw 
one last look on the beautiful mutilated body, lying motionless, 
and, for the first time, pale before a man’s eyes. Then I picked 
up the poor little heart which was lying on the dusty floor, and 
which they had used to insult and abuse each other, and carried 
away in my hussar’s belt—the heart of the child they said was 
mine.” 

Here Chevalier de Mesnilgrand stopped, overcome by an emo- 
tion which they all respected, materialists and dare-devils as they 
were. 

“And La Pudica?” asked—almost timidly—Rangonnet, who 
was no longer toying with his glass. 

“I never heard again of La Rosalba, alias La Pudica,” replied 
Mesnilgrand. “Is she dead? Is she still alive? Was the surgeon 
able to go to her? After the surprise of Alcudia, which was so 
fatal to us, I looked for him. I could not find him. He had dis- 
appeared like many others and had not rejoined the remnant of 
our decimated regiment.” 

“Ts that all?” said Mautravers. “And, if that is all, that’s a 
fine sort of story. You were right, Mesnil, when you told Sélune 
that you would cap his story of the eight nuns, violated, and 


bf 


A DINNER OF ATHEISTS 235 


thrown into a well. But as Ranconnet is dreaming in his chair, 
I will take up the question where he left it. What connexion has 
your story with your devotions in the church the other day?” 

“True,” said Mesnilgrand. “You were right to remind me of 
it. This is what remains to be told to you and Rançonnet. For 
many years I carried about, as a relic, the heart of the child I 
supposed to be mine; but when, after Waterloo, I was obliged 
to take off the belt in which I had hoped to die, and when I had 
carried for some years longer that heart—and I assure you, 
Mautravers, that it was heavy, though it may seem to you very 
light—reflection came with age, and I feared to profane, even but 
a little more, that heart so profaned already, and I decided to 
place it in Christian ground. 

“I spoke, therefore, to one of the priests of this town, without 
entering into all the details which I have given you to-day, and 
it was that heart, which had so long weighed on mine, that I had 
just placed in his hands in the confessional of the chapel, when 
Rançonnet grabbed me in the aisle.” 

Captain Rançonnet was probably satisfied. He did not utter a 
syllable; nor did the others. No remarks were made. A silence, 

more expressive than any words, sealed the mouths of all. 

_ Did these atheists at last understand that even if the Church 
had been established for nothing else but to receive those hearts— 
dead or alive—with which we no longer know what to do, it would 
be accomplishing a good work? 

“Serve up the coffee,” said old Monsieur de Mesnilgrand, in his 
high-pitched voice. “If it is only as strong as your story, Mesnil, 
it will be good.” 





A WOMAN’S REVENGE 


YEN 
Ne of 


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A WOMAN’S REVENGE 


Foriter. 


I wave often heard of the daring of modern literature, but, for 
my own part, I have never believed init. The reproach is merely 
an idle boast of morality. Literature, which has long been called 
the expression of society, does not express it at all—quite the re- 
verse; and when some writer, bolder than the others, dares to go 
a little further than they do, heaven knows what a fuss is made. 
If you examine the matter you will find that literature does not 
relate half the crimes which society commits mysteriously and 
with impunity every day, with delightful frequency and facility. 
Ask the confessors—who would be the greatest novelists the world 
has ever had if they could relate the stories which are whis- 
pered into their ears in the confession-box. Inquire how many 
cases of incest (for example) are committed in the proudest and 
noblest families, and see if literature, which is so much accused 
of immoral boldness, has ever dared to relate them, even to terrify 
the evil-doers. Except for a slight breath—which is but a breath, 
after all—on the subject in the René of Chateaubriand—the re- 
ligious Chateaubriand—I do not know of a book in which incest, 
an offence so common in our day, both in the upper and lower 
ranks of society, and, perhaps, more in the lower than in the 
upper, has been freely handled, and all the lessons of a truly 
tragic morality deduced therefrom. Has modern literature—at 
which hypocrisy throws its little stone—ever dared to relate the 
histories of Myrrha, Agrippina, and Œdipus, which (believe me) 
are as true to-day as they were then; for I have not lived—at 
least up to now—in any other hell than the social hell, and I 
have, for my own part, known and rubbed shoulders with plenty 
239 


240 THE DIABOLIQUES 
of Myrrhas, Œdipuses, and Agrippinas in private life, and what 


is called the best society. Parbleu! their stories are not related 
as they would be on the stage, or in history. But glimpses may 
be seen under the social surface of precautions, fears, and hy- 
pocrisies. 

I knew—and all Paris knew—a Madame Henri III, who wore 
at her girdle a little chaplet of death’s-heads, mounted in gold, 
and hanging down on her blue velvet dress; and who sometimes 
flogged herself, mingling her penance with the other pleasures of 
Henri III. Who would write the history of that woman, who 
composed pious works, and whom the Jesuits believed to be a 
man (a nice detail that) and even a saint? 

It is not many years ago since a lady of the Faubourg Saint- 
Germain took her mother’s lover, and furious at seeing that 
lover return to her mother—who, though old, knew better than her 
daughter how to make herself loved—stole some of the letters her 
mother had addressed to this lover, had them lithographed, and 
thrown by thousands from the “Paradise” (well named for 
such an action) of the opera on the night of a first performance! 
Who has ever written the history of that woman? If poor lit- 
erature essayed to write such stories it would not know at which 
end to begin. 

Yet that is what it would relate if it were outspoken. 

History has many a Tacitus and Suetonius; Romance has not 
—at least among writers who possess both morality and talent. 
It is true that the Latin language dares to be honest—like the 
pagan that it is—whilst our language was baptized with Clovis 
in the font of Saint-Remy, and there contracted an imperishable 
modesty, for the old woman still blushes. 

Nevertheless if a writer dared to dare, a Suetonius or a Tacitus 
might exist amongst the novelists, for the Novel is specially the 
history of manners put in a dramatic form, and History is often 
the same. There is only this difference between them; that the 
one (the Novel) describes manners under the cover of fictitious 
personages, and the other (History) gives the real names and 


A WOMAN’S REVENGE 241 


addresses. But Romance goes further than History. It has an 
ideal, whilst History has not, being restrained by reality. Ro- 
mance, too, holds the stage for a much longer period. Lovelace 
will live longer in Richardson than Tiberius will in Tacitus. 

But if Tiberius in Tacitus was described as fully as Lovelace 
is in Richardson, do you think that History would lose by that, 
and Tacitus would be less terrible? But I am not afraid to say 
that Tacitus, as a painter, is beneath Tiberius as a model, and 
that in spite of all his genius he is crushed by it. 

And that is not all. To this striking but inexplicable failure 
in literature, when you compare its reality with the reputation it 
has, must be added the physiognomy that crime has assumed 
in these times of delightful progress. High civilization deprives 
crime of its terrible poetry, and does not allow an author to 
restore it. “That would be too horrible,” those people say who 
like to look on the light side of everything, even crime. One of 
the advantages of philanthropy! Idiotic criminalists diminish the 
penalty, and inept moralists the crime, and yet they only diminish 
the latter in order to reduce the penalty. The crimes of high 
civilization, however, are certainly worse than those of extreme 
barbarism, by the very fact of their refinement, the corruption 
which they indicate, and the higher degree of intelligence of the 
perpetrators. The Inquisition knew that well. At a time when 
religious faith and public manners were both strong, the In- 
quisition, the tribunal which judged thought—that great institu- 
tion, the very idea of which puckers our weak nerves, and turns 
our feather-brained heads—the Inquisition knew well that spirit- 
ual crimes were the worst, and punished them as such. 

And in fact if those crimes appeal less to the senses, they ap- 
peal more to the intellect; and the intellect, after all, is the deep- 
est part of us. The novelist, therefore, can draw upon a whole 
realm of unknown tragic crimes, more intellectual than physical, 
which seem less criminal to the superficiality of an old, material- 
istic society because no blood was spilt, and the murder was 
within the domain of sentiment and custom. 


242 THE DIABOLIQUES 


It is of this kind of tragedy that I wish to give a specimen in 
relating the history of a vengeance of a most terribly original 
nature, in which no blood flowed, and neither steel nor poison 
was used; a civilized crime, in fact, in which the narrator has 
invented nothing but his manner of relating the story. 

Towards the end of the reign of Louis-Philippe, a young man 
was one evening strolling along the Rue Basse-du-Rempart, which 
at that time well deserved its name Basse, for it was lower than 
the pavement of the Boulevard, and formed an excavation, always 
sombre and badly lighted, and to which you descended from the 
Boulevards by two staircases which turned their backs to one 
another—if you can employ that term about two staircases. ‘This 
excavation, which no longer exists, ran from the Chaussée d’Antin 
to the Rue Caumartin, where it again sloped upwards to the level 
of the Boulevard. This dark valley was not over-safe in the 
day-time, and few dared to venture into it at night. The Devil 
is the Prince of Darkness, and this was one of his principalities. 
Almost in the middle of this excavation, and bordered on one side 
by the Boulevard, which formed a terrace, and on the other by 
some large, quiet-looking houses with carriage-entrances, and a 
few old-furniture shops, there was a narrow, uncovered passage, 
in which the wind—if there were ever so little wind—whistled 
down as though it were a flute, and this passage led to the Rue 
Neuve-des-Mathurins. 

The young man in question was well dressed, and he had taken 
this path, which was certainly not a path of virtue, because he 
was following a woman, who had entered this suspiciously dark 
passage without hesitation or embarrassment. 

He was evidently a dandy, or, as it was called in those days, 
“a yellow glove.” He had had a good dinner at the Café de 
Paris, and afterwards had leaned against the low balcony (now 
removed) at Tortoni’s, chewing his tooth-pick and ogling the 
women who passed along the Boulevard. This particular woman 
had passed in front of him several times, and although this cir- 
cumstance, and her loud dress and swaggering walk showed 


A WOMAN’S REVENGE 243 


plainly what she was, and although this young man, who was 
called Robert de Fressignies, was horribly blasé, and had returned 
from the East (where he had seen every variety and species 
of the animal woman), yet, the fifth time this nightwalker had 
passed him, he had followed her—currishly, as he said of him- 
self—for he possessed the faculty of examining and judging his 
own acts, though his judgment did not prevent the acts, even 
when they were contrary to it—a terrible asymptote! 

Fressignies was more than thirty years of age. He had out- 
lived that first youth of folly which makes a man the buffoon 
of his own senses, and during which any woman exerts a mag- 
netic influence over him. He was long past that. He was a 
libertine of the cold and calculating sort of that positive age— 
an intellectual libertine who had thought about those feelings of 
which he was no longer the dupe, and was neither afraid nor 
ashamed of any of them. 

What he had seen, or what he thought he had seen, had aroused 
a curiosity to analyse a new sensation. He had therefore left his 
balcony and followed her—resolved to see to its end this vulgar 
adventure he had undertaken. For him, the woman who was 
gliding gracefully in front of him was only one of the lower sort 
of prostitutes, but she was so beautiful that he could not help 
wondering her beauty had not obtained her a higher position, and 
that she had not found someone who would save her from the 
miseries of the streets, for in Paris, whenever God places a pretty 
woman there, the Devil in reply immediately puts a fool to keep 
her. 

And then Robert de Fressignies had another reason for fol- 
lowing her, besides her wondrous beauty (which perhaps the 
Parisians did not see, for they know very little about true beauty, 
their æsthetic standard being low). She resembled someone he 
had seen. She was the mocking-bird which imitates the night- 
ingale, of which Byron speaks so sadly in his memoirs. She re- 
minded him of another woman. He was certain, absolutely cer- 
tain, that it was not she, but she resembled her enough to deceive 


244 THE DIABOLIQUES 


anybody, if deceit had not been impossible. He was, moreover, 
more attracted than surprised by this, for he had enough ex- 
perience as an observer to know that, in the long run, there is 
much less variety than is imagined in human faces, the features 
of which are ruled by hard and fast geometrical laws, and are 
easily classified in a few types. Beauty is single. Only ugliness 
is multiple, and even then its multiplicity is soon exhausted. 
God has decreed that infinite variety should exist only in the 
physiognomy, because the physiognomy is the reflection of the 
soul across the lines—straight or erratic, natural or contorted— 
of the face. 

Fressignies said all this confusedly to himself as he followed 
along the Boulevard the sinuous steps of this woman, who looked 
prouder than Tintoretto’s Queen of Sheba, in her dress of saffron 
satin with gold shades—that colour which is so much esteemed by 
the young Roman women—and the shiny folds as she walked 
rustled and shone and seemed a call to arms. She threw back 
her figure to an extent rarely seen in France, and she wore a 
magnificent Turkish shawl with stripes of white, scarlet, and gold, 
and the red feather of her white bonnet—splendid in its bad 
taste—hung down to her shoulder. At that period, women wore 
long drooping feathers which they called “weeping willows.” 

But there was nothing weeping about this woman, and her 
feather expressed something else rather than melancholy. 

Fressignies thought she would take the Rue de la Chaussée 
d’Antin, then sparkling with its thousand lamps, and saw with 
surprise all the showy finery of the courtesan, all the impudent 
pride of the harlot disappear into the Rue Basse du Rempart— 
the disgrace of the Boulevard at that time. 

The dandy, less brave than she, hesitated to risk his varnished 
boots in such a street. It was but for a second. The gold robe, 
lost sight of for an instant in the shadows of this dark hole, re- 
appeared beyond the spot where the solitary lamp shed its flicker, 
and he hastened to it. He had not much difficulty in overtaking 
the woman—she was waiting for him, sure that he would come, 


A WOMAN’S REVENGE 245 


and as he came up to her she looked him full in the face, meeting 
his glance with all the effrontery of her calling. He was liter- 
ally blinded by the beauty of the face, which, though plastered 
with rouge, was of a golden brown, like the wings of certain 
insects, and which the dim light falling from the lamp could not 
pale. 

“You are Spanish!” said Fressignies, who saw that she was one 
of the purest types of that race. 

“Si,” she replied. 

To be a Spaniard meant something at that time, something 
highly quoted in the market. The novels of those days, the plays 
of Clara Gazul, the poetry of Alfred de Musset, the dances of 
Mariano Camprubi and Dolores Serral, had caused the daughters 
of Spain to be popular favourites, and many women claimed to be 
Spanish who had no right to the title. But this woman appeared 
to take no special pride in her nationality. 

“Will you come?” she said brusquely, with all the familiarity of 
the low-class prostitute. 

The tone, the harsh, hoarse voice, the sudden familiarity of the 
tutoiement, so heavenly upon the lips of a woman you love, and 
so horribly insolent in the mouth of a creature to whom you are 
a stranger, would have sufficed to disgust Fressignies, but the 
Devil tempted him. Curiosity, spiced with desire, seized him, and 
for this woman, who was more to him than a superb animal in 
satin, and for her sake he would not only have swallowed Eve’s 
apple, but all the toads in a marsh. 

“By Jove! of course I will,” he replied. As though she could 
doubt it! “I will take precautions to-morrow,” he thought. 

They entered the passage which leads to the Rue des Mathurins. 
Amidst the huge blocks of stone which lay about, and the build- 
ings which were being erected, there stood one house alone, nar- 
row, ugly, grim, which must have seen much vice and much crime 
on every floor of its old crumbling walls, and which perhaps had 
been left there that it might see more still. À blind-looking 
house, for not one of its windows (and windows are the 


246 THE DIABOLIQUES 


eyes of a house) was lighted—a house that seemed to cling 
to you as you groped in the dark night. This horrible house 
had the sort of entrance usual to such places, and, at the end 
of a miserable corridor, was the staircase, the first few steps of 
which were lighted by a dim flicker from a dirty lamp. 

The woman entered a narrow passage which was filled by her 
shoulders, and her sweeping, rustling dress, and with a step evi- 
dently accustomed to the place, slowly ascended the winding stair- 
case, appropriately snail-like in this case, for the walls were 
slimy. 

But, what was rather unusual in such a den, the dirty staircase 
grew lighter as you ascended, and at the first floor it was no longer 
the feeble glimmer from the stinking oil-lamp, but a strong light, 
which became splendid when the second floor was reached. Two 
bronze griffins, fastened to the wall, bore a number of candles, 
and illuminated with strange luxury a common-looking door, on 
which was pasted the card which women of that sort use as the 
sign of their calling. 

Surprised at this unexpected magnificence in such a place, 
Fressignies paid more attention to these candelabra, which had 
evidently been wrought by the hand of a skilful artist, than to the 
card which bore the woman’s name, which he did not need to 
know, since he accompanied her. As he looked at them, whilst 
she turned the key in the lock of the door so curiously ornamented 
and flooded with light, he remembered the surprises which were 
often found in the houses of prostitutes in the days of Louis XV. 
“This woman,” he thought to himself, “has read some novel or 
some memoirs of those times, and has had a whim to fill her apart- 
ment with all sorts of voluptuous coquetries where you would 
never have expected to find them.” 

But what he saw when the door was opened, redoubled his 
astonishment—but in a very different manner. 

It was in fact only the ordinary, untidy room of the common 
prostitute. Dresses thrown about on every article of furniture, 
a big bed—the field of her manceuvres—with those immoral 


A WOMAN’S REVENGE 247 


looking-glasses at the end and on the ceiling, showed well what 
sort of an occupant the apartment had. On the mantelpiece were 
bottles of perfume, carelessly left uncorked by the woman when 
she started out on her evening prowl, and the odours, mingling 
with the warm air of the room, formed an atmosphere in which 
a man’s energy would melt away at the third breath he took. 
Two candelabra, similar to those at the door, burned on either 
side of the chimney. Skins of various animals were thrown down 
over the carpet. Through a half-open door could be seen a 
mysterious dressing-room—the vestry of the priestess. 

All these details Fressignies did not notice till later. He saw 
nothing at first but the woman. Knowing where he was, he did 
as he liked. He threw himself on the sofa, and made the woman 
—who had taken off her bonnet and shawl and thrown them on an 
arm-chair—stand between his knees. He took her by the waist, 
as though he would have spanned it with his two hands, and 
looked at her from head to feet, like a toper who raises his glass to 
the light before sipping the wine. The impression he had formed 
on the Boulevard had not deceived him. Blasé and accustomed to 
women as he was, he could not help owning she was splendid. 
The resemblance, which had struck him so much in the broken 
light and shade, this woman still preserved in the full light of 
the room. But the person of whom she made him think, though 
her features were so like that they seemed identical, had not that 
expression of resolute and almost terrible pride which the Devil, 
the father of all anarchy, had refused to a duchess, and had given 
—for what purpose?—to a street-walker of the Boulevards. 
When she had bared her head, her black hair, yellow dress, and 
her broad shoulders, which were surpassed in breadth by her 
hips, she reminded you of the Judith by Vernet (a picture of 
that period), but her body was more suited for the sports of 
love, and the face was even more ferocious. 

This grim ferocity was perhaps due to a wrinkle which divided 
her beautiful eyebrows, and extended to her temple: Fressignies 
had seen the same thing in some Asiatic women in Turkey. It 


248 THE DIABOLIQUES 


seemed a striking contrast that this woman had the figure of her 
profession, but not the face. The harlot’s body seemed to say 
eloquently: “Take me”—yet this rounded cup of love which in- 
vited both the hands and lips, was surmounted by a face the 
haughty pride of which would have arrested desire, and petrified 
the hottest lust into respect. 

Happily the ready smile of the courtesan with which she was 
able to disguise the scornful curl of her lips, attracted to her those 
whom the cruel pride of her face would have repelled. On the 
Boulevard she had displayed this set smile, but now, when she 
was standing in front of Fressignies and between his knees, she 
was serious, and her face wore such a stern implacable look that 
if she had had a curved sabre in her hands, the dandy, Fressignies, 
could, without conceit, have imagined himself Holophernes. 

He took hold of her unarmed hands, and remarked how beau- 
tifully formed they were. She silently allowed him to examine 
her, and she also looked at him, not with the sordid interested 
curiosity of women of her sort, who look at you as you would 
look at a doubtful coin. Evidently there was something beyond 
the gain she was about to make or the pleasure she was about 
to give. There was in the open nostrils, which were quite as 
expressive as the eyes, and seemed to dart forth flames as the 
eyes did, a stern decision, as of that of some crime to be com- 
mitted. “If the implacable look of that face were due to love, 
what a piece of good fortune for me in these empty, hollow- 
hearted days!” thought Fressignies, who before he got rid of a 
whim, examined it as though it were an English horse. 

He, the experienced, the critical in the matter of women, who 
had bought pretty girls in the market at Adrianople, and who 
knew the price of human flesh of that colour and firmness, threw, 
as the price of a couple of hours with this woman, a handful of 
louis into a blue glass cup which was placed on a level with his 
hand on a console table, and which cup had probably never re- 
ceived so much gold. 


A WOMAN’S REVENGE 249 


“Ah, you like me, then?” she cried impudently, and perhaps 
impatient at the long examination, in which curiosity had seemed 
more powerful than desire, and which had been either a loss 
of time for her or an impertinence. “Let me take off all this,” 
she added, as though her dress weighed heavily upon her, as 
she pulled open the buttons. 

She sprang from his knees and hurried into the dressing-room. 
A prosaic detail! did she want to “spare” her dress? The dress 
is the most useful tool of these workwomen. Fressignies, who 
thought he had detected in her face the unquenchable lust of a 
Messalina, was brought face to face with the commonplace. He 
felt once more that he was in the chamber of à prostitute—a 
common prostitute of Paris, in spite of a face so out of keeping 
with the destiny of her to whom it belonged. “Bah!” he thought, 
“romance is never but skin-deep with these women; you must take 
it where you can find it.” 

In following this woman, he had but obeyed an irresistible 
curiosity, and a vulgar whim, but when she who had inspired 
these feelings came out of her dressing-room, where she had 
taken off her habiliments, and came towards him in the costume, 
which was not one, of a gladiatrix about to fight, he was literally 
thunderstruck by a beauty which his experienced eye—the sculp- 
tor’s eye of the real lover of woman—had not entirely divined on 
the Boulevard, in spite of the whispered revelations of the dress 
and the walk. If the lightning had entered by the door in place 
of her, he could not have been more profoundly struck. 

She was not quite naked—but she was worse. She was much 
more indecent than if she had been honestly naked. Statues 
are naked, and their nakedness is chaste. It is even a boasted 
chastity. But this woman, who was wickedly immodest, who 
would have lighted herself, like one of the living torches of the 
garden of Nero, that she might better incite the passions of men, 
and who had, no doubt, been taught by her profession all the 
common tricks of depravity, had combined the insidious, trans- 


250 THE DIABOLIQUES 


parency of gauze and the daring of bare flesh, with the bad taste 
of abominable libertinism—for who does not know that in libertin- 
ism bad taste is powerful? 

Her monstrously provoking appearance reminded Fressignies 
of that undesirable statuette before which he had often stopped, 
for it was on view then at every shop where bronzes were sold, 
and upon the pedestal of which you read nothing but the mys- 
terious inscription: “Madame Husson.” A dangerous obscene 
dream! The dream here was a reality. Before that irritating 
reality, that perfect beauty which had not the coldness perfect 
beauty too often has, Fressignies, who had been in Turkey, had 
he been the most blasé Pasha of Three Tails, would have re- 
covered the emotion of a Christian, or even of an anchorite. 

So, when—certain of the effect she would produce—she came 
hurriedly towards him, and placed, almost against his mouth, the 
magnificent charms of her bosom, with a movement like that of 
the courtesan who tempts the Saint in the picture by Paul Ver- 
onese, Robert de Fressignies, who was not a saint, yearned for 
what she offered him, and took the temptress to his arms with a 
passion which she reciprocated, for she threw herself into his 
arms. Did she throw herself like that into the arms of everyone 
who embraced her? However skilful she might be in the arts and 
profession of the prostitute, she could not always have been as 
furious and ardent as she was that night, and which not even 
exceptional excitement or morbid desire would explain. Had she 
only just embraced the horrible profession, that she exercised it 
with so much ardour? ‘There seemed so much of the wild beast 
about her, that one would have thought she either wished to lose 
her own life or take that of the other in each of her caresses. At 
that time the Parisian prostitutes, who did not think the pretty 
name of lorette, which literature had bestowed upon them, and 
which Gavarni had immortalized, was sufficiently serious, had 
adopted the Oriental soubriquet of “panthers.” Not one of them 
had a better right to be called a panther. She had all the sup- 
pleness, the activity, the bounds, the scratches, and the bites. 


A WOMAN’S REVENGE 251 


Fressignies could testify that no woman who had ever been in 
his arms up to then had given him such indescribable sensations 
as this woman gave him in a delirium of lust which was conta- 
gious; yet he had been in love. 

Yet—must it be said to the glory or to the shame of human 
nature?—there are in what we call (with an excess of scorn, per- 
haps) pleasure, abysses as deep as those of love. Was it in 
these abysses that she overwhelmed him, as the sea overwhelms a 
strong swimmer in its depths? She greatly surpassed the most 
guilty souvenirs of this hardened libertine, and soared even to 
the limits of his imagination, violent and depraved as it was. 
He forgot everything—both what she was, and why he had come 
into that house, and into that room, which, when he had entered 
it, had almost sickened him. She had positively drawn his soul 
into her own body. She rendered him delirious, though his senses 
were not easily intoxicated. She satiated him with such voluptu- 
ous delights that at one time this atheist in love, this sceptic in 
all things, had the foolish thought that he had taken the fancy of 
this woman who bartered her body. Yes, Robert de Fressignies, 
who had almost the same steel-like character as his model, Robert 
Lovelace, believed that he must have inspired a caprice, at least, 
in the heart of this prostitute, who could not behave like that with 
everybody without being soon consumed by her own lust. 

He thought this for two minutes—like a fool—he, the clever 
man! But the vanity which she had lighted at the fire of a 
pleasure as burning as that of love, experienced between two 
caresses the shiver of a sudden doubt. A voice cried to him 
from the depths of his soul: “It is not yourself she loves in you,” 
for he had noticed that when she was the most pantherish, and 
was clinging to him the most lovingly, she was absorbed in the 
contemplation of a bracelet she wore on her arm, and which 
Fressignies saw contained the portrait of a man. Some words 
in Spanish, which Fressignies, who did not know the language, did 
not understand, mingled with the cries of the bacchante, and 
seemed to him to be addressed to this portrait. 


282 THE DIABOLIQUES 


Then the idea that he was passing for someone else—that he 
was there on account of another—flashed across his mind, and 
chilled his passion to ferocity. In one of those fits of absurd 
jealousy, and tigerish vanity, when a man is not the master of 
himself, he seized her arm roughly, and demanded to see this 
bracelet which she regarded with an ardour which was certainly 
not intended for him at such a moment, when all of this woman 
ought to belong to him. 

“Show me that portrait!” he said in a voice that was even 
harder than his hand. 

She understood, but showed no indignation. 

“Surely you cannot be jealous of a girl like me,” she said. 
But it was not the word “girl” that she employed. To the sur- 
prise of Fressignies, it was the coarsest epithet ever applied as an 
insult to a woman that she used. 

“Do you want to see it?” she added. “Well! look!” And she 
placed before his eyes her beautiful arm, still reeking with the 
intoxicating sweat of the pleasure in which they had been indulg- 
ing. 

It was the portrait of an ugly, lean man, with an olive com- 
plexion, and yellowish-black eyes, very gloomy-looking, but not 
without an air of nobility; the air of a bandit or a Spanish grandee. 
And he must have been a Spanish grandee, for round his neck 
was the ribbon of the Golden Fleece. 

“Where did you get that?” said Fressignies—who thought to 
himself: She will spin me a yarn about how she was seduced; 
the story of the “first one’—the regular story all these women 
tell. 

“Get!” she replied indignantly. “Por dios, it was he himself 
who gave it to me!” 

“He! who? your lover, no doubt?” said Fressignies. “You de- 
ceived him. He drove you away, and you have come down to 
this.” 

“It is not my lover,” she replied coldly, as insensible to the 
insult of such a supposition as though she had been of bronze. 


A WOMAN’S REVENGE 253 


“Perhaps he is not any longer,” said Fressignies. “But you 
love him still—I saw it just now in your eyes.” 

She laughed bitterly. 

“Ah, don’t you know the difference between love and hate?” 
she cried. “Love that man! Why, I detest him! It is my 
husband!” 

“Your husband!” 

“Yes, my husband,” she said; “the greatest noble in all Spain; 
thrice a duke, four times a marquis, five times a count, grandee of 
Spain, and many other titles, knight of the Golden Fleece. I am 
the Duchess of Arcos de Sierra Leone.” 

Fressignies, almost thunder-struck by these incredible words, 
had not the slightest doubt as to the truth of this astounding 
statement. He was sure the woman did not lie. He had recog- 
nized her. The likeness which had so much struck him on the 
Boulevards proved it. 

He had met her before, and not so very long ago either. 

It was at Saint-Jean de Luz, where he had gone for the bathing- 
season. That year, it happened that all the best Spanish society 
had visited this little town on the coast of France, which is so 
close to Spain that you may still imagine yourself in Spain, and 
to which even the most patriotic Spaniards could resort without 
treason to their country. The Duchess of Sierra Leone had re- 
sided all that summer in that little town so profoundly Spanish in 
its manners, character, appearance, and historical associations, 
for—it may be remembered—it was there that were celebrated the 
marriage festivities of Louis XIV—the only king of France, by 
the way, who resembled a Spanish king. 

The Duchess of Sierra Leone was then, it was said, on her 
honeymoon, after her marriage to the greatest and richest noble- 
man in Spain. When Fressignies arrived in this fishing-village, 
the birth-place of some of the most terrible filibusters the world 
has ever known, she was displaying a luxury and extravagance 
such as the place had never known since the days of Louis XIV; 
and her beauty even surpassed that of the Basque women, though 


254 THE DIABOLIQUES 


they, with their beautiful antique figures, and ultramarine eyes, 
need fear few rivals. 

Attracted by her beauty, and being, by birth and fortune, able 
to enter any society, Robert de Fressignies had endeavoured to 
get an introduction to her, but the little circle of Spanish society 
of which the duchess was the centre, was strictly closed that year 
to all the French who were passing the season at Saint-Jean de 
Luz. The duchess, seen from afar, either on the beach, or at 
church, left without his being able to make her acquaintance, and 
for that reason she had remained in his memory like one of those 
meteors which pass and are never seen again. He had travelled 
in Greece and part of Asia, but of all the most beautiful women of 
those countries in which beauty holds such a high place that the 
inhabitants of the country cannot conceive a heaven without it, 
he had seen no one who could efface the remembrance of the 
duchess. 

And now, by a strange and incomprehensible chance, this duch- 
ess, admired for an instant and then gone, had returned into his 
life by the most incredible means. She was leading an infamous 
life—he had bought her. She had belonged to him. She was 
nothing more than a prostitute, and a prostitute of the lowest 
class; for there are ranks even in infamy. The superb Duchess 
of Sierra Leone, of whom he had dreamed, and whom he had, 
perhaps, loved—a dream is so near love in our souls!—was no 
other—could it be really possible’—than a street-walker in 
Paris!!! It was she who had been in his arms but a few moments 
before, as she had been in the arms of another—any comer, like 
himself—the previous night, and as she would be in the arms of 
a third to-morrow, or—who knows?—perhaps in another hour. 
This terrible discovery struck him as with a hammer of ice. 

The man in him, which had burned so hotly but a minute be- 
fore, was now sobered, chilled, crushed. The idea—the certainty 
—that she was really the Duchess of Sierra Leone, had not re- 
vived his desires, which had been extinguished as suddenly as a 
candle that is blown out, and his mouth no longer sought to take 


A WOMAN’S REVENGE 255 
long draughts of the delights of which he had drunk. By re- 


vealing herself, the duchess had caused the courtesan to disappear. 
To him, she was now only the duchess—but in what a condition! 
soiled, ruined, lost, fallen from a greater height than the Leucadian 
rock into a filthy and disgusting sea of mud, from which no power 
could rescue her. 

He looked at her with a haggard eye, as she sat there, upright 
and grim, metamorphosed and tragical, at the extremity of the 
couch on which they were lying—a Messalina changed at once 
into some mysterious Agrippina. He no longer cared to touch, 
even with the tip of his finger, that creature who had made his 
blood boil, and prove that she was an illusion—that he did not 
dream—that he was not mad! The duchess had emerged from 
the harlot, and the phenomenon had stunned him. 

“Yes,” he said with an effort, for his voice stuck in his throat 
and choked him. “I believe you [he no longer addressed her 
familiarly] for I recognize you. I saw you at Saint-Jean de Luz 
three years ago.” 

At the name, her face lighted up for a moment. 

“Ah,” she said, “I was then enjoying all the intoxications of 
life—and now!” 

The light died out of her eyes, but she did not lower her 
head. 

“And now?” echoed Fressignies. 

“Now,” she said, “it is the intoxication of vengeance. But I 
will make it so deep,” she added with concentrated violence, 
“that I will die in that vengeance; like the mosquitoes in my 
country, which die, gorged with blood, in the wound they have 
made.” 

She gazed into the face of Fressignies. 

“You do not understand,” she said, “but I will make you under- 
stand. You know what I am, but you do not know all that I am. 
Would you like to know? Would you like to learn my history? 
Shall I tell it to you?” she went on with excited persistence. “TI 
like to tell it to all who come here. I would like to tell it to all 


256 THE DIABOLIQUES 
the world. I should be more degraded, but I should be the bet- 


ter revenged.” 

“Tell me!” said Fressignies, moved by a curiosity and interest 
such as he had never felt to a like degree, neither in his life, 
nor in novels, nor at the theatre; for it seemed to him that she 
must needs relate a story such as he had never heard. He thought 
no more of her beauty. He looked at her as though he were 
about to assist at the autopsy on her dead body. Was she about 
to revive it for him? 

“Yes,” she continued, “I have often wished to relate my history 
to those who come up here; but they say they didn’t come here 
to hear stories. When I begin, they interrupt me or they go 
away—brutes gorged with what they have obtained. Either 
indifferent, or mocking, or insulting, they call me a liar or a mad 
woman. ‘They do not believe me, but you will believe me. You 
have seen me at Saint-Jean de Luz in all the glory of a happy 
woman, in the highest position, and wearing as a diadem that 
name of Sierra Leone which I now trail at the skirt of my dress 
through all the filth, as they used in old days to drag at a horse’s 
tail the shield of a dishonoured knight. 

“That name, which I hate, and only bear that I may degrade it, 
is still borne by the greatest lord of all Spain, and the proudest 
of all those who have the privilege to remain covered before His 
Majesty the King; for he thinks himself ten times more noble 
than the king. What are the most illustrious houses which have 
reigned over Spain—Castile, Aragon, Transtamare, Austria, and 
Bourbon—to the Duke of Arcos de Sierra Leone? He is, he says, 
of older family than they. He is descended from the old Gothic 
kings, and is allied by Brunehild to the Merovingians of France. 
He prides himself on having nothing but ‘blue blood’ in his veins, 
whilst even the oldest families, degraded by misalliances, have 
now only a few drops. 

“Don Christoval d’Arcos, Duke of Sierra Leone, and otros 
ducados, made no misalliance in marrying me. I am a Turre- 
Cremata, of the old family of the Turre-Crematas of Italy— 


A WOMAN’S REVENGE 257 


the last of the Turre-Crematas, for the race ends with me, who 
am well fitted to bear the name of Turre-Cremata [burnt tower] 
for I have been burnt with all the fires of hell. The Grand In- 
quisitor, Torquemada, who was descended from the Turre- 
Crematas, inflicted fewer tortures in all his life than there are in 
my accursed breast. 

“I must tell you that the Turre-Crematas were not less proud 
than the Sierra Leones. Divided into two branches, both equally 
illustrious, they were for centuries all-powerful in Italy and Spain. 
In the fifteenth century, during the pontificate of Alexander VI, 
the Borgias, who in the intoxication of their good fortune wished 
to appear connected with all the royal families of Europe, gave 
out that they were connected with us, but the Turre-Crematas 
scornfully denied the assertion, and two of them paid with their 
lives for their proud audacity. They were, it is said, poisoned 
by Cesar Borgia. 

“My marriage with the Duke of Sierra Leone was a match be- 
tween two families. Neither on his side nor on mine was there 
any feeling in the matter. It was quite natural that a Turre- 
Cremata should ‘marry a Sierra Leone. It was quite natural, 
even to one brought up in the terrible etiquette of the old Spanish 
families, which reflected that of the Escurial—that hard and 
stifling etiquette which prevented hearts from beating—unless 
the hearts were stronger than the iron corsets. 

“I was one of those hearts. I loved Don Esteban. Before I 
met him, my married life was without happiness—the grave affair 
that it was formerly in ceremonious and Catholic Spain, though 
it is not the rule now, except in a few aristocratic families which 
preserve the old customs. The Duke of Sierra Leone was too 
much of a Spaniard not to keep up the old customs. All that 
you have heard in France about Spanish gravity, and the manners 
of that proud, silent, and moody race, was true and more than 
true of the Duke. 

“Too proud to live elsewhere than on his own estates, he in- 
habited a feudal castle on the Portuguese frontier, and his 


258 | THE DIABOLIQUES 


habits were more feudal than his castle. I lived there with him, 
and divided my time between my confessor and my waiting- 
women—a sumptuous, monotonous, and sad life, which would 
have killed with boredom a weaker mind than mine. But I had 
been brought up for what I was—the wife of a great Spanish 
nobleman. Then I had the religious sentiment of a woman of my 
rank, and was nearly as passionless as the portraits of my an- 
cestresses which hung in the galleries of the castle of Sierra Leone. 
I should have added a generation the more to this row of irre- 
proachable majestic women whose virtue was guarded by their 
pride as a fountain is guarded by a lion. 

“The solitude in which I lived did not weigh upon my soul, 
which was as peaceful as those mountains of red marble which 
surround Sierra Leone. I did not suspect that under that mar- 
ble slept a volcano. I was in a limbo, like an unborn child, but 
I was about to be born, and receive, by one look from a man, the 
baptism of fire. 

“Don Esteban, Marquis of Vasconcellos, of a Portuguese family, 
and cousin to the Duke, came to Sierra Leone, and love, of which 
I had no idea beyond what I had gleaned from a few books, 
swooped down upon my heart as an eagle swoops down on and 
carries off a child who cries out. I cried out also. I was a 
Spanish woman of old family. My pride revolted when I felt 
myself in the presence of this dangerous man, Esteban, who ex- 
ercised such a terrible influence over me. I told the Duke to 
make some pretext to get rid of him, but he must leave the castle 
at once—that I saw he was in love with me, and I was offended 
by it as by an insult. But Don Christoval replied to me in the 
words of the Duke of Guise when he was warned that Henri III 
would assassinate him: ‘He would not dare!’ It was the dis- 
dain of Destiny—which avenged itself by accomplishing itself. 
That reply threw me into the arms of Esteban.” 

She paused for an instant; he listened to her and would have 
known, by her words and expressions, that she was, without any 
doubt, who she said she was—the Duchess of Sierra Leone. Ah! 


A WOMAN’S REVENGE 259 


the street-walker of the Boulevard was entirely obliterated. You 
would have declared that a mask had fallen, and that the real 
face, the real person, had reappeared. Even her attitudes had be- 
come chaste. Whilst she was speaking, she had taken from the 
sofa behind her a shawl, and wrapped it round that “cursed” 
breast—as she had called it—which prostitution had not been 
able to rob of its perfect form and virgin freshness. Even her 
voice had lost the hoarseness it had when she was in the street. 
Was the illusion produced by what she said?—at any rate, it 
seemed to Fressignies that her voice sounded purer and clearer— 
that she had recovered her nobility. 

“I do not know,” she continued, “whether other women are 
like me. But that incredulous pride of Don Christoval—that 
disdainful and calm ‘He would not dare,’ in speaking of the man 
I loved, seemed to me, in the bottom of my soul, like an insult 
to the man I reverenced as a God. ‘Prove to him that you can 
dare, I said to him that same evening when I told him of my 
love. ‘There was no need to tell him. Esteban had loved me 
from the first day he saw me. Our love had been like two pistol- 
shots fired together, and which both kill. 

“I had done my duty as a Spanish woman in warning Don 
Christoval. I now owed him nothing but my life, as I was his 
wife, for the heart is not free to love where it likes; and my 
life he would certainly have taken had he driven away Don 
Esteban as I wished. My heart had so overflowed that it would 
have driven me mad not to see him again, and I exposed myself 
to that terrible chance. But as the Duke, my husband, had not 
understood that—since he thought himself so superior that he 
deemed it impossible that de Vasconcellos could lift his eyes or 
pay court to me, I was not going to push my conjugal heroism 
too far, in opposition to a love which ruled me. 

“I will not endeavour to give you an exact idea of that love. 

“Perhaps you would not believe me if I did.—But, after all, 
what does it matter what you would believe? You may believe 
me, or not believe me! it was a love at once both burning and 


260 THE DIABOLIQUES 


chaste—a chivalric, romantic, almost ideal, almost mystic love. 
It is true that we were both hardly twenty years old, and that 
we belonged to the same race as Bivar, Ignatius Loyola, and Saint 
Theresa. Ignatius, the knight of the Virgin, did not love the 
Queen of Heaven more purely than Vasconcellos loved me; and 
I, for my part, feel for him somewhat of that ecstatic love which 
Saint Theresa had for her divine Spouse. 

“Adultery? bah! Did it even enter our minds to be adulterous? 
Our hearts beat too high, we lived in an atmosphere of sentiments 
so transcendent and elevated that we felt nothing of the evil lusts 
of sensuality and vulgar love. We lived under a clear, blue sky; 
but the sky was African, and the blue was a fire. Could souls 
exist under such conditions? Was it possible for it to last? 
Were we not playing, without knowing or suspecting it, at the 
most dangerous game in which weak mortals could indulge, and 
were we not bound to be precipitated sooner or later from this 
stainless height? 

“Esteban was as pious as a priest, or as a Portuguese knight 
of the time of Albuquerque; and assuredly I was no worse than 
he, for I had in him, and his love for me, a faith which kindled 
the purity of my love. I lived in his heart like a Madonna in its 
niche of gold, with a lamp at her feet—an unextinguishable lamp! 
He loved my soul for my soul. He was one of those few lovers 
who wish to ennoble the woman they adore. He wanted me 
to be noble, devoted, heroic—one of the great women of those 
times when Spain was great. He would rather have seen me 
do a good action than waltz with me mouth to mouth. If the an- 
gels before the throne of God love one another, they must love 
as we loved. 

“We were so much to each other that we passed long hours 
together and alone, hand in hand, eyes meeting eyes; able to do 
all we would, for we were alone, but so happy that neither de- 
sired more. Sometimes this immense happiness which filled us, 
pained us by its very intensity, and we wished to die—but with 
each other and for each other, and we understood then the say- 


A WOMAN’S REVENGE 261 


ing of Saint Theresa, ‘I die of being unable to die!’—that desire 
of the finite creature succumbing under an infinite love, and think- 
ing to give more scope to the torrent of infinite love by the an- 
nihilation of life. I am now the lowest of soiled creatures, but 
believe me, at that time the lips of Esteban had never touched 
mine, but if he kissed a rose and I kissed it after him, it made me 
swoon. In this sea of horror in which I plunged voluntarily, I 
remember each instant, as my punishment, the divine joys of 
the pure love in which we lived, lost, absorbed, and so openly, 
no doubt, in the innocence of our sublime affection, that Don 
Christoval had not much difficulty in seeing that we adored each 
other. We lived with our heads in the skies. How could we 
perceive that he was jealous, and with such a kind of jealousy? 
The only one of which he was capable—the jealousy of pride. 

“He did not take us by surprise—only those who conceal them- 
selves can be surprised. We did not conceal ourselves. Why 
should we? Our love was like the flame burning in open day, 
which can be perceived even in the daylight, and, besides, our 
happiness was so great that it could not fail to be seen, and the 
Duke saw it. Blinded as he was with pride, the splendour of 
our love dazzled his eyes. Ah! Esteban had dared. I also! 
One evening we were, as usual, gazing at one another, and he was 
at my feet before me, as before the Virgin Mary, in a contempla- 
tion so profound that we needed no caress. Suddenly, the Duke 
entered with two Negroes whom he had brought back from the 
Spanish colonies, of which he was for a long time Governor. 

“We did not see them—lost as we were in the heavenly con- 
templation which elevated our souls whilst uniting them—when 
Esteban’s head fell heavily on my knees. He was strangled! 
The Negroes had thrown round his neck that terrible lasso with 
which in Mexico they strangle the wild cattle. It was done with 
the rapidity of lightning. But it was lightning which did not 
kill me. I did not faint, I did not cry out. No tears came to 
my eyes. I remained silent and rigid, in a nameless state of 
horror, from which I could not escape without a violent wrench 


262 THE DIABOLIQUES 


to my soul. I felt as though my breast had been opened, and 
my heart torn out. Alas! it was not mine that was torn 
out—it was Esteban’s. The corpse of Esteban, which lay at my 
feet strangled, was cut open, and the hands of these monsters 
groped in it as though it had been a sack! 

“My love caused me to feel as much as Esteban would have 
himself felt had he been alive. I felt the pain his corpse could 
not feel, and it was that which released me from the horror which 
had seized me when they strangled him. I threw myself upon 
them. ‘Kill me also!’ I cried. ‘I wish to die the same death!’ 
and I stretched forth my neck for the cord. They were about 
to put it round. 

“Touch not the queen!’ said the Duke, that proud Duke who 
thought himself greater than the king, and he drove away the 
Negroes with his riding-whip. 

“No! you shall live, Madame,’ he said, ‘in order that you may 
remember always that which you are about to see.’ 

“He whistled. ‘Two enormous savage dogs rushed in. 

“ “Give the heart of the traitor,’ he said, ‘to these dogs.’ 

“At that, a feeling—I know not of what—overcame me. 

“Seek a better revenge than that! I cried. ‘It is I you should 
make eat it.’ 

“He seemed astounded at the idea. 

“You love him, then, so wonderfully?’ he said. 

“Ah! I loved him with a love my husband had rendered 
boundless. I loved him so that I should have felt neither fear 
nor disgust at that bleeding heart, filled with me, and still warm 
with me—and I wished to join that heart to mine. I prayed for 
it on my knees with joined hands. 

“I wished to spare that noble, adored heart that impious, sac- 
rilegious profanation. 

“I would have communed with that heart as with a Host. 

“Was he not my God? The resolution of Gabrielle de Vergy, 
whose story Esteban and I had so often read together, came to 
my mind. I deemed her happy to have made her breast the liv- 


A WOMAN’S REVENGE 263 


ing tomb of the man she loved. But the sight of such a love made 
the Duke fiercely implacable. 

“His dogs devoured Esteban’s heart before me. I fought with 
them for it, but I could not snatch it from them. 

“They covered me with fearful bites, and tore my dress with 
their bloody jaws.” 

She paused. These memories had made her face become livid 
—and she arose breathlessly, and, opening a drawer, took from it, 
and showed to Fressignies, a dress, torn to tatters, and stained 
with blood in many places. 

“Look!” she said; “that is the heart’s blood of the man I 
loved—the heart I could not save from the dogs. When the 
thought of the accursed life I am leading occurs to me; when I 
am filled with disgust; when the filth rises to my mouth and 
chokes me; when the spirit of vengeance is weak within me; 
when the former duchess returns and the life of the harlot shocks 
me, | wrap myself in this robe, my soiled body wallows in its 
red folds that still burn me, and my vengeance revives. There 
is a talisman in these bloody rags! When they are around my 
body the rage for vengeance burns within me, and I recover 
strength that, it seems to me, will last for an eternity.” 

Fressignies shuddered as he heard this terrible woman. 

He shuddered at her gestures, her words, her face, which was 
like that of a Gorgon; he seemed to see round her head the snakes 
this woman had in her heart. 

He began to understand—the curtain was drawn!—the word 
“vengeance” which was ever on her lips. 

“Vengeance! yes,” she continued; “you understand now what 
my vengeance is. Ah! I have chosen it amongst all others, as 
you choose amongst all kinds of daggers that which will create 
the most suffering—the toothed blade which will best tear the flesh 
of the hated being you kill. I did not wish to kill that man at 
a blow. 

“Had he killed Vasconcellos with his sword, like a gentleman? 
No, he had had him killed by his varlets. He had thrown his 


264 THE DIABOLIQUES 


heart to the dogs, and his body on the dunghill, perhaps. I did 
not know. I have never known. Kill him, for that? No! that 
would have been too gentle, too speedy! I needed a vengeance 
that was slower and more cruel. Besides, the Duke was brave. 
He did not fear death. Every generation of the Sierra Leones 
had faced it courageously. But his pride, his enormous pride, 
was cowardly when it concerned dishonour. I must torture him 
in his pride therefore. I would dishonour the name of which he 
was so proud. I swore to myself that I would drag that name 
through the most stinking mire—that I would cover it with shame- 
ful and nameless filth!—and for that I have become what I am— 
a common harlot—the public prostitute Sierra Leone, whom you 
have ‘picked up’ to-night!” 

As she said these last words her eyes sparkled as though with 
the joy of a well-struck blow. 

“But,” said Fressignies, “does the Duke know what you have 
become?” 

“If he does not know it now, he will know it some day,” she 
replied with the absolute confidence of a woman who has thought 
of and calculated every chance, and who is sure of the future. 
“The stain of my shame is sure to reach him some day or other. 
One of the men who has come here will spit in his face his wife’s 
dishonour, and that spittle will be never wiped off; but that is 
only a chance, and I would not leave my vengeance to chance. 
That I may be quite sure, I have resolved to die, and my death 
will assure my revenge.” 

Fressignies could not guess the meaning of these last words, 
but her next sentence threw a hideous light upon them. 

“I wish to die as the prostitutes like me do die,” she continued. 
“Do you not know that there was a man in the time of Francis 
I who caught, from a woman like me, a terrible and shameful 
disease, that he might give it to his wife to poison the king, whose 
mistress she was, and thus he might be revenged on both? I 
would do no less than that man did. The shameful life I lead 
will some day cause the putrefaction of debauchery to gnaw the 


A WOMAN’S REVENGE 265 


prostitute, and then I shall rot away and die in some hospital. 
Oh, then I shall have paid the debt I owe,” she added with the 
enthusiasm of this most terrible hope; “then it will be time 
enough for the Duke of Sierra Leone to learn how his wife, the 
Duchess of Sierra Leone, has lived and died.” 

Fressignies had not imagined the depth of her vengeance, which 
exceeded aught that he had ever read in history. Neither in 
Italy in the fifteenth century, nor in Corsica at any time, though 
both countries were renowned for implacable revenge, did he 
remember to have heard of such a deeply calculated and terrible 
vengeance as that of this woman, who sacrificed to her revenge 
both her body and soul. He was terrified at its horrible sublimity, 
for intensity in any passion, carried to such a point, is sublime. 
But it is the sublimity of hell. 

“And even if he did not know it,” she continued again, “I, 
at least, should know it. I should know what I do every night— 
that I drink this filth and find it nectar because it is my revenge. 
Do I not rejoice every minute at the thought of what I am? Have 
I not, each time that I dishonour this haughty duke, the delirious 
joy of knowing that I dishonour him? Do I not see clearly in my 
own mind all that he would if he knew it? Ah, feelings like 
mine may be insane, but it is their madness which makes their 
happiness. When I escaped from Sierra Leone, I brought with 
me the Duke’s portrait, that I might show this portrait, as though 
it were himself, the shameful life I lead! How many times have 
I said to him, as though he could see and hear me: ‘Look! 
Look!” And when I feel the horror of being in the arms of you 
men—for I always do feel it: I can never get accustomed to the 
taste of this filth—I have for a resource this bracelet”—and she 
raised her superb arm with a tragic movement. 

“I have this ring of fire which burns me to the marrow; and 
which I keep on my arm, despite the torture of wearing it, that 
I may never forget the executioner of Esteban; that his image 
may excite my transports—those transports of vengeful hate 
which men are stupid enough and conceited enough to believe are 


266 THE DIABOLIQUES 


due to the pleasures they create in me! I do not know who you 
are, but you are certainly more than a mere chance-comer; and 
yet you thought, but a moment ago, that I was still a human 
creature—that there was still a fibre of humanity which vibrated 
in me; and yet there was in me but the idea of revenging Esteban 
on the monster whose portrait is here. Ah! his portrait was for 
me like the spur, broad as a sword, which the Arab horseman 
drives into his horse’s flank to make it cross the desert. 

“I had even a wider expanse of shame to cross, and I buried 
that abominable portrait in my eyes and in my heart, that I 
might the better bound under you when you held me in your 
arms. ‘This portrait was as though it were himself; as though 
he saw us with his painted eyes! 

“How well I understand the spell of the waxen image in those 
days of sorcery! How I should have enjoyed the senseless happi- 
ness of planting a dagger in the heart of the image of the man 
I wished to kill! In those days when I was religious—before I 
loved Esteban, who took the place of God for me—I had need 
of a crucifix that I might the better think of the Crucified: but 
if, instead of loving Him, I had hated Him, I should have been 
an impious wretch had I needed a crucifix that I might the bet- 
ter blaspheme and insult. 

“Alas!” she added, changing her tone, and passing from the 
harshness of the most cruel feeling to the deep sweetness of the 
most surprising melancholy, “I have no portrait of Esteban. I 
only see him in my mind’s eye—and that is, perhaps, fortu- 
nate. If he were before my eyes, he would lift up my poor 
heart; he would make me blush at the unworthy humiliation 
of my life. I should repent, and then I could no longer avenge 
him!” 

The Gorgon had become tender, but her eyes remained dry. 
Fressignies, moved by quite another sentiment than those which 
she had excited in him, took her hand, and kissed it with a re- 
spect mingled with pity. So much misfortune and energy had 
made her seem great in his eyes. “What a woman!” he thought 


A WOMAN’S REVENGE 267 


to himself. “If instead of being the Duchess of Sierra Leone, 
she had been the Marquise de Vasconcellos, she would, by the 
purity and warmth of her love for Esteban, have offered to 
human admiration something akin and equal to the great Mar- 
quise de Pescaire.—Only,” he added to himself, “she would not 
have shown it, and no one would ever have known the depth and 
force of her character.” 

Despite the scepticism of the period, and his habit of watching 
the world only that he might laugh at it, Robert de Fressignies 
did not feel it absurd for him to kiss the hand of this fallen 
woman; but he did not know what to say to her. By throwing 
her story between him and her, she had cut, as though with an 
ax, those transient ties which bound them together. He felt 
an inexpressible mixture of admiration, horror, and scorn; but he 
would have deemed it very bad taste to have preached sentiment 
or morality to this woman. He had often laughed at those mor- 
alists who had neither warrant nor authority, and who pullulate 
in these days, and who, under the influence of certain dramas or 
novels, think it their bounden duty to pick up fallen women 
as though they were flower-pots that had been knocked over. 
Sceptic as he was, he was endowed with sufficient good sense to 
know that it is only the priest—the priest of redeeming God— 
who can raise such fallen creatures—and he believed that even 
the priest would be powerless against the soul of this woman. 
All kinds of sad thoughts weighed upon his heart, and he pre- 
served a silence that was more embarrassing to him than to her. 
She, carried away by the violence of her ideas and her memories, 
continued: 

“The idea of dishonouring instead of killing this man, for whom 
honour—as the world understands it—was more than life, did 
not occur to me at once. It was long before I thought of that. 
After the death of Vasconcellos, whose presence in the castle 
was, perhaps, not known, and whose body had probably been 
thrown into some cell with those of the Negroes who had assas- 
sinated him, the Duke never addressed a word to me, except 


268 THE DIABOLIQUES 


briefly and ceremoniously before people, for Czsar’s wife should 
be above suspicion—and I should have remained in the eyes of 
all, the immaculate Duchess d’Arcos de Sierra Leone. But when 
alone with me, never a single word or allusion passed; only silence 
—the silence of the hate which feeds itself, and has no need of 
speech. Don Christoval and I fought each other with the weap- 
ons of resolution and pride. I kept back my tears. I am a 
Turre-Cremata. I have all the potent dissimulation of my race, 
which is Italian, and I turned to bronze, so that he should not 
suspect the idea of vengeance which lurked beneath that face 
of bronze. I was absolutely impenetrable. Thanks to that dis- 
simulation, which closed every opening though which my secret 
might filter, I prepared my flight from the castle, the walls of 
which crushed me, and where I could not accomplish my ven- 
geance, for the Duke would have prevented me. I trusted no 
one. Had any of my duennas or waiting-women ever dared to 
lift their eyes to mine to learn my thoughts? 

“At first I thought of going to Madrid; but at Madrid the Duke 
was all-powerful, and the police would have arrested me at once. 
I should have been sent back to him, and once sent back, I should 
have been thrown into the in pace of some convent, and buried 
there between four walls, out of the world—the world I so needed 
for my vengeance. Paris was safer. I preferred Paris. It was 
a better stage for the display of my infamy and my revenge; 
and as I wished that it should one day burst like a thunder-clap, 
what better place than this city, the centre of all echoes, and 
through which pass all the nations of the world! I resolved to 
live there the life of a prostitute, and boldly to descend to the 
lowest ranks of those fallen women who sell themselves for a 
piece of money, even to the lowest ruffians. 

“I was pious before I knew Esteban, who tore God from my 
heart to put himself in the place, and often rose in the night 
and went, without my women, to say my prayers before the 
Virgin in the chapel. It was from there one night that I made 
my escape, and boldly gained the gorges of the Sierras. I carried 


A WOMAN’S REVENGE 269 


with me all the jewellery I could, and all the money in my cash- 
box. I hid myself for some time, amongst the peasants, who 
conducted me to the frontier. I came to Paris, and fearlessly 
began this vengeance which is my life. I thirst so for revenge 
that I have sometimes thought of fascinating some energetic young 
man, and then sending him to the Duke to tell him my ignominy, 
but I have always ended by dismissing that idea, for it is not 
merely a few feet of filth that I wish to pile on his name and my 
memory—it is a whole pyramid of dung. The later I am avenged, 
the better I shall be avenged.” 

She stopped. She had turned from a livid hue to purple. The 
sweat ran down her forehead, and she became hoarse. She fever- 
ishly seized a water-bottle that stood on a side-table, poured 
herself out a large glass, and drained it at a draught. 

“It is hard to get used to shame,” she said, “but I must get 
used to it. I have swallowed enough of it during these three 
months to be used to it.” 

“Flas it lasted three months?” (he did not dare to say what) 
asked Fressignies with a vagueness that was more horrible than 
precision. 

“Yes,” she replied, “three months. But what is three months?” 
she added. “It needs time to cook and recook the dish of ven- 
geance I prepare for him, and which will repay for refusing me 
Esteban’s heart that he would not let me eat.” 

She said this with terrible passion and a wild sadness. Fres- 
signies did not suspect that there could exist in a woman such a 
mixture of idolatrous love and cruelty. He had never gazed with 
more concentrated attention on any work of art than he did at 
this singular and most powerful artiste of vengeance who stood 
before him. 

But something that he was astonished to feel, mingled with his 
contemplation as an observer. He thought he was free from in- 
voluntary sensations, but he felt that in the same atmosphere as 
this woman he was breathing a dangerous air. The room, so full 
of physical and savage passion, choked the civilization within him. 


270 THE DIABOLIQUES 


He needed fresh air, and he thought he would go, even if he 
should return. 

She believed that he was about to leave. But there was still 
one side of her character she had to reveal to him. 

“And that?” she said with one of the disdainful gestures of 
the former Duchess, and pointing with her finger to the blue 
glass cup that he had filled with gold. 

“Take back that money,” she said. “Who knows? Perhaps 
I am richer than you. No gold enters here. I accept it from 
no one.” And with the pride of a degradation which was her 
revenge, she added: “I am only a five-franc girl!” 

The sentence was said as it was thought. It was the last trait 
of that reversed and infernal sublimity which had been spread 
before him, and which certainly the great Corneille had never 
imagined in the depths of his tragic soul. The horror of this 
last sentence gave Fressignies the strength to go away. He 
emptied the gold out of the cup, and only left what she had asked. 
“Since she wishes it,” he said, “I will press upon the dagger she 
has driven in, and I will add my stain of mire, since it is that she 
requires.” 

He left, much excited and agitated. The candelabras still shed 
their flood of light over the common-looking door through which 
he had passed. He understood now why they were put there when 
he saw, pasted on the door, the card which was the sign of this 
mart of human flesh. There was written on the card, in large 
letters: 


THE DUCHESS D’ARCOS 
DE SIERRA LEONE 


and underneath was a horrible word, to tell what her calling was. 

Fressignies returned home that night, after this adventure, so . 
troubled in mind that he was almost ashamed. Fools—that is to 
say, nearly all the world—believe that it would be a charming 


A WOMAN’S REVENGE | 271 


invention if we could grow young again, but those who know 
life well know it would be an unprofitable transaction. Fres- 
signies owned to himself that perhaps he felt too young—and he 
therefore vowed never to see the Duchess again, in spite of the 
interest, or rather because of the interest, the woman created in 
him. 

“Why,” he said, “return to that infected place into which a 
woman of high rank has wilfully precipitated herself? 

“She has told me all about her life, and I can easily imagine 
the horrible details of her present existence, which never change.” 

Such was the resolution which Fressignies made when he was 
sitting by the fire in the solitude of his own room. For some 
time he did not indulge in any amusements out of his own house, 
but remained thinking over the impressions and memories of an 
evening on which his mind could not help but linger, as on a 
strange and powerful poem, the like of which he had never read 
either in Byron or Shakespeare, his two favourite poets. 

Thus he passed many hours, with his elbow on the arm of his 
chair, dreamily turning over in his mind the ever-open pages of 
this hideously powerful poem. It was to him a lotus which made 
him forget the salons of Paris—his country. It required a strong 
effort of will to make him return there. The irreproachable 
duchesses he met there seemed colourless. 

Though Fressignies was not prudish, or his friends either, he 
never said a word about his adventure, through a feeling of 
delicacy which he deemed absurd—for had not the Duchess asked 
him to tell her story to all comers, and spread it abroad as much 
as he could? On the contrary, he kept it to himself. He put it 
under seal in the most mysterious corner of his soul, as you 
cork a bottle of very rare perfume which loses somewhat of its 
scent each time you smell it. Considering what sort of man he 
was, it was astonishing that neither at the Café de Paris, nor the 
club, nor in the stalls at the theatre, nor anywhere else where 
men talk unreservedly, did he speak to any of his friends without 


272 THE DIABOLIQUES 


being afraid to hear related the counterpart of his own adyen- 
ture; and he trembled during the first ten minutes of a con- 
versation lest that chance should arrive. 

Nevertheless, he kept his word, and revisited neither the Rue 
Basse du Rempart nor the Boulevard. He no longer leaned, like 
the yellow-gloved dandies of his day, against the balcony at 
Tortoni’s. “If I were to see that confounded yellow dress flaunt- 
ing before me,” he said to himself, “I should perhaps be fool 
enough to follow her again.” 

He loved yellow dresses now, though he had always detested 
them. “She has spoiled my taste,” he said; thus did the dandy 
in him make fun of the man. But what Madame de Staél, who 
knew them, calls somewhere or other “the Devil’s thoughts,” were 
stronger than the man or the dandy. Fressignies became moody. 
He had been lively in society, and well known for his gaiety. 
His spirits were gone. “Is he in love?” the gossips asked. The 
old Marquise de Clérembault, who thought that he was in love 
with her grand-daughter, then just fresh from the Sacré Cœur, 
and romantic, as people were then, said to him crossly: “I can- 
not bear you when you put on those Hamlet airs.” First he was 
sad and then he became ill. His complexion grew leaden. 
“What is the matter with Monsieur de Fressignies?” they asked, 
and perhaps they would have discovered that he had a cancer 
in his stomach, like Bonaparte; but one fine day he put an end 
to all questions and inquiries concerning him, by packing up his 
portmanteau, and disappearing as suddenly as though he had gone 
down a trap. 

Where had he gone? What was he doing? He was away 
more than a year, and then he returned to Paris and took his 
usual place in society. One night he was at the Spanish Embassy 
—where all the best society in Paris had congregated on that oc- 
casion. It was late. Supper had been announced, and the salons 
had emptied, everyone crowding round the buffet. In the card- 
room a few men were lingering over a game of whist. All at 
once Fressignies’s partner, who was turning over the pages of a 


A WOMAN’S REVENGE 273 


little tortoise-shell note-book in which he wrote down the bets 
that were made over each rubber, saw something which made 
him say: “Ah!”—as a man does when he finds something he has 
forgotten. 

“May I ask your Excellency,” he said, addressing the Spanish 
Ambassador, who was standing with his hands behind his back, 
watching the game, “if there are any of the Sierra Leone family 
still at Madrid?” 

“Certainly there are,” replied the Ambassador. “In the first 
place, there is the Duke, who is the peer of the highest grandees 
in the realm.” 

“Who, then, is this Duchess of Sierra Leone who has just died 
in Paris—and what relation is she to the Duke?” continued the 
questioner. 

“That must be his wife,” quietly replied the Ambassador. 
“But for nearly two years the Duchess has been looked upon as 
dead. She disappeared; and no one knew why or how she disap- 
peared—it has always been a profound mystery. You must know 
that the splendid Duchess d’Arcos de Sierra Leone was not like a 
woman of the present day—one of those silly girls that any lover 
can carry off. She was quite as haughty as the Duke, her hus- 
band, who is certainly the proudest of the Ricos hombres of all 
Spain. Moreover, she was pious—of an almost monastic piety. 
She lived always at Sierra Leone, a desert of red marble, where 
the eagles, if there are any there, must die of boredom amongst 
the peaks. One day she disappeared, and no one has ever found 
a trace of her. Since that time, the Duke—who is quite a man 
of the time of Charles V, and to whom no one has ever dared to 
put the least question—has lived in Madrid, and has never said 
any more about his wife and her disappearance than though 
she had never existed. She was a Turre-Cremata—the last of the 
Turre-Crematas of the Italian branch of the family.” 

“Exactly,” interrupted the player, and he looked at the page of 
his note-book. “Well, then,” he added solemnly, “I have the 
honour to inform your Excellency that the Duchess of Sierra 


274 THE DIABOLIQUES 


Leone was buried this morning and—what you would assuredly 
never suspect—she was buried at the church of the Salpêtrière, of 
which hospital she was an inmate.” 

At these words, the players laid their cards down on the table 
and gazed at the speaker in amazement. 

“Yes,” said the player, who saw he was “making a hit”—a 
thing so delightful to every Frenchman, “I was passing by there 
this morning, and I heard such beautiful sacred music that I en- 
tered the church—such events being rare there—and I nearly 
tumbled backwards when I passed the portal—which was draped 
with black, in the centre of which was a coat of arms with many 
quarterings, to see in the choir the most magnificent catafalque. 
The church was almost empty. There were a few beggars in the 
poor seats, and one or two women—some of the horrible lepers 
from the hospital near by, who were not insane, and could stand. 
Surprised at seeing such an assemblage round such a catafalque, I 
approached, and read this inscription, which was written in 
large silver letters on a black ground, and which so astonished me 
that I copied it in order that I might not forget it: 


HERE LIES 
SANZIA FLORINDA CONCEPTION 
DE TURRE-CREMATA 
DUCHESS D’ARCOS DE SIERRA LEONE, 
A REPENTANT HARLOT. 
DIED AT THE SALPETRIERE THE — — 18— 


Requiescat in pace.” 


The players thought no more about the game. As for the 
Ambassador, although a diplomatist ought no more to show sur- 
prise than an officer ought to show fear, he felt that his astonish- 
ment might compromise him in the eyes of his guests. 

“And you asked for no information?” he cried, as though he had. 
been speaking to one of his inferiors. 

“No, your Excellency,” replied the player. “There were only 
a few poor people there—and the priests, who perhaps might 


A WOMAN’S REVENGE 275 


have informed me, were chanting the Mass. Besides, I re- 
membered that I should have the honour to see you this evening.” 

“T shall have the information to-morrow,” said the Ambassador. 

The game finished, but was broken by so many exclamations, 
and everyone was so preoccupied with his own thoughts, that even 
the best whist-players made mistakes, and no one perceived that 
Fressignies had turned pale, seized his hat, and left suddenly, 
without taking leave of anyone. 

The next morning he was at the Salpêtrière early. He ques- 
tioned the chaplain—a good old priest—who gave him all the in- 
formation he asked concerning “No. 119,” otherwise the Duchess 
of Sierra Leone. The wretched woman had ended as she had 
foreseen she would end. At the terrible game she had played, 
she had gained a most frightful disease. “In a few months,” said 
the old priest, “she was rotten to the bones. She had died— 
stoically—in intolerable sufferings. She was still rich, and had 
much money and jewels which she had bequeathed to other 
patients in the hospital, and she had ordered a grand funeral. 

“Only, to punish herself for her disorderly life,’ said the old 
priest, who knew nothing about this woman’s life, “she insisted, 
in her penitence and humility, that it should be put after her 
titles, both on her coffin and on her tomb, that she was a Re- 
pentant Harlot. 

“And even,” added the old chaplain, who had been deceived by 

_ her confession, “so great was her humility that she did not wish 

_ the word ‘repentant’ to be written.” 

Fressignies smiled bitterly, but he took care not to undeceive 
the simple, good old priest. 

_ For he knew that she had not repented, and that this touching 

humility was a further vengeance after her death. 


A NOTE ON THE TYPE IN 
WHICH THIS BOOK IS SET 


The type in which this book has been set (on the Lino- 
type) is Caslon Old Face, a faithful and authentic re- 
production from the original patterns of William 
Caslon 1. Historically considered, Caslon’s old face 
types are the most important contribution the English 
speaking world has ever made to the art of typography. 
No other face has ever attained to so lasting and 
general a popularity. Caslon’s types were made to 
read. Even their apparent imperfections contribute to 
this effect being, in fact, the result of a deliberate 
artistry which sought above all else for legibility in the 
printed page. 


SET UP, ELECTROTYPED AND PRINTED BY 
THE VAIL-BALLOU PRESS, INC., BING- 
HAMTON, N. Y. * PAPER MANUFAC- 
TURED BY THE TICONDEROGA PULP 
AND PAPER CO., TICONDEROGA, 
N. Y. AND FURNISHED BY W. F. 
ETHERINGTON & CO., NEW 
YORK * BOUND BY THE H. 
WOLFF ESTATE, NEW 
YORK. * 


















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